Daniel L. Davis 0:10
All right shall welcome it’s Scott Horton shelf. I am the director of the libertarian Institute editorial director of anti war.com, author of the book fool’s errand, time to end the war in Afghanistan. And I’ve recorded more than 5000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org dot org. We can also sign up to the podcast feed full archive is also available@youtube.com. Slash Scott Horton show. Aren’t you guys online I’ve got retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L. Davis, an American hero, not for his military service, but for his great whistleblowing at the end of the Afghan surge in 2012. He broke ranks and went public Blick and announced David Petraeus for lying to the American people into the US Congress, about the state of that war, and what needed to happen. And he’s been fighting for an end to it, and a rational foreign policy ever since then to welcome back to the show. How you doing, Danny?

Thanks, God, I love to be on your show. Thanks for having me.

Scott Horton 1:19
Very happy to have you here. So and I could have mentioned you were in Iraq War One iraq war to Afghanistan. And you know what, actually, let’s talk about this a little bit your tour in Afghanistan, you had a especially kind of unique view of the war rather than being stationed just here. There. You are all over the country. On that last tour there, right.

Daniel L. Davis 1:42
Yeah, I was working for an organization called the rapid equipping force, which was basically a created offshoot under the Army’s g three the operations department in the Pentagon, for the purpose of trying to shorten the amount of time from the the point where an organization You know, brigade says, Hey, we need this kind of equipment, we need this thing we didn’t know we needed until we got on the ground, you know, the normal acquisition process would have taken longer than a than a tour last. And that would be pointless to do to you know, to get them what they needed after they left. So they created this. They said, hey, let’s let’s give them what they need as rapidly as possible. So they had my organization had an on the ground presence and I was the Afghan team chief. And I was required to literally go to every combat brigade in Afghanistan all over the country, army brigades to find out how they were doing, what their operations were looking lack and where were the holes in their equipment so that we could get them what they needed quickly. So that gave me the opportunity. Literally to see everything on the ground drawn the you know, the position of the absolute lowest level in the in the tactical zone on all across the country from the east to the to the I guess kind of the Middle East. And then all the way to RC South all the way across there. So I really may have had the best view of on the ground reality Afghanistan has anybody.

Scott Horton 3:08
Yeah. And then so what was it that was so off that had you breaking ranks? And you wrote a big piece in with the Armed Forces journal? right.

Daniel L. Davis 3:18
Right. Yeah, it was, it was painfully obvious from you know, from the get go, that all the things that you know, like David Petraeus, Michele Flournoy, were saying in front of Congress or you know, on every news channel that would listen to them, newspapers, etc, was nothing close to be in the truth, everything that they said about we’re on the right Asmath and things are strings are starting to improve, we broken their momentum, all those catchphrases. They used it everybody loved to repeat, simply were not true. They were just statements that were made to make people think things were going better. But on the ground, it was blatantly obvious that they weren’t. And anyone who had an opportunity to see on the ground, you know, virtually everybody I talked to, at the tactical level understood exactly what I did, because they lived it. The only people who didn’t wear those, you know, at the highest ranks and a lot of the, you know, the civilian leaders who just wanted to cling to the fiction, they wanted the reality to be what they preferred it to be, not what it really was. And frankly, and the reason that drove me to go in public is that they didn’t seem concerned at all about the human cost to it. The fact that there were so many Americans who were getting killed, getting their limbs blown off getting traumatic brain injuries, suffering from PTSD, that didn’t seem to be a big problem for them to continue to maintain the fiction. And, you know, now we see the results of that, you know, eight years later and continue on with no closer to an end than we were before. We still have all of the details and the evidence, physical evidence on the ground screaming that it’s not working. And, you know, hopefully, maybe now that we’re gonna finally do something to get out. We’ll see if Trump makes good on his Look, what’s been reported is something that he wants to do. Let’s see how that works out, but maybe there’s a chance.

Scott Horton 5:06
Alright, so I wrote this book fool’s errand and that title about Afghanistan. And that title comes from an interview of you where I had asked you, okay, but what if instead of betray us, we had had a competent, General and honest one? And what if he had had 300,000 or 400,000 troops instead of just the hundred and 40,000 that he had? And that was what the Hawks were saying was, look, Obama, he gave him an escalation surge, but not as much of one as he really wanted. And things could have gone that much better. And then you said, Nope, it was a fool’s errand all along, no matter what. But so. Explain why that’s true. Then even if I gave you a magic wish, 500,000 men you still couldn’t win this war of their Colonel. What’s the deal?

Daniel L. Davis 5:57
Yeah, that’s correct. Yeah. And that was that was Such a just be blunt. That was crap from the beginning. Because, first of all, the guy who asked for those troops Stan McChrystal, General McChrystal, he had originally asked for 40,000, Obama ended up giving him 30,000 plus 7000. NATO. So he almost got everything that he asked for number one. Number two is that that came after Obama already added almost 20,000. Before that. So he actually in the span of a single calendar year, added 50,000 troops to the ground. So this claim that oh, well, we didn’t win because we didn’t have enough troops is crap because they had tons of troops on there more than anyone even thought they could get in a single year. But to your second point, absolutely correct. If it was 500,000, we still wouldn’t win because of the nature of the fight itself. The only way that you win with 500,000 is if you’re going against an army, like when I went to Desert Storm, and not 90 and fought in 1991. We had 500,000 troops that were deployed there. And we were facing a physical army on the battlefield. And we were able to defeat that military folk. And we were able to win and then redeploy five months later, right? I mean, that’s a classic military victory. There is no enemy army in Afghanistan. Because, as I saw, I’ll just give you one example because it was so graphic to me, I went down into I want to say it was God’s new province, I think it was Gosney in in the middle of the summer of 2011. And the the unit that I had went to visit there had just had a big battle the day before, to secure the forward most position in their zone of a building complex that the Taliban had been using as a forward operating post and they, they drove them out of there. And so the unit was going back in the next day, to begin establishing it as an American strong point, which is there, you know, like I said, forward most and so I went with the whole and That? Well, while they’re literally digging sandbags, or you know, putting sandbags around, They’re digging in machine gun pits, they’re, you know, they’re siding in their weapons and you know, to have converging fields of fire and all that kind of thing, that normal stuff that you would do in a, in a setting up a strong point, I can see off in the distance in what looks like a wheat field, I think it was, you could see a bunch of black turbans in there and maybe a mile and a half away. But with binoculars, you can see them pretty clearly. And, you know, the The question is, are those Taliban? Are those people that we drove out? Or are they just the farmers who own that land, and they’re just curious as to what the Americans are doing? They’re coming to see there’s no way for us to know at the time. Now, some people might say, well, you should have just killed him, just kill them all. And then that way you make sure you get the bad guys will of course that would make us an immoral organization because that mean we would be willingly killing we people that we knew some percentage of would be innocent. And that’s not the American way. That’s not the way anyone should operate. Because you don’t know you have to wait until they attack in order to shoot the back, because by day they’re there. Some of them are farmers. But not some of those people are Taliban. But some of those same farmers aren’t Taliban. Some of the other farmers aren’t Taliban there. They literally are just farmers. They don’t like the Taliban, they don’t want to go, no one can distinguish one from the other. So it’s impossible, whether you had 50 100,000 500,000 don’t make any difference because you can’t distinguish the enemy on the battlefield, all you can do is create more targets. And this is precisely the dynamic we saw from the beginning of the Obama surge. All we did by putting more troops on the ground would provide more targets for the Taliban to attack and that’s precisely what they did. That’s why they casually count went way up, but we still didn’t secure anything because as soon as we predictably left, they came right back in as though we were never there, and they’re still there. To this day. In higher numbers. Now point is one last thing out right here. At the time I went over there, there was estimated 20,000 Taliban. Do you realize it today after eight years, and you know those wanted to have many surgeries and now then this is even smaller search that Trump has done since he’s become president. It’s now estimated at 60 to 80,000. So everything that we’ve done all the casualties we suffered all the Taliban that we’ve killed, which is estimated at 40,000 higher all it’s done is increase the number of Taliban and done nothing to diminish it. You can see militarily it is on winnable.

Scott Horton 10:38
Hey, I’ll check it out. The libertarian Institute. That’s me and my friends have published three great books this year. First is no quarter, the ravings of William Norman Greg. He was the best one of us. Now he’s gone. But this great collection is a truly fitting legacy for his fight for freedom. I know you’ll love it. Then there’s coming to Palestine by the great Sheldon Richmond It’s a collection of 40 important essays he’s written over the years about the truth behind the Israel Palestine conflict. You’ll learn so much and highly valued this definitive libertarian take on the dispossession of the Palestinians and the reality of their brutal occupation. And last but not least, is the great Ron Paul, the Scott Horton show, interviews 2004 through 2019, interview transcripts of all of my interviews of the good doctor over the years, on all the wars, money taxes, the police state and more. So how do you like that? Pretty good, right? Find them all at libertarian Institute. org slash books. Hey, you guys may know I’m involved in some libertarian party politics this year, but you can’t hear or read about that at the libertarian Institute due to 501 c three rules and such. So make sure to sign up for the interviews feed at Scott horton.org and keep an eye on my blog at Scott Horton. org slash stress. Hey, y’all, Scott here. If you want to real education in history and economics, you should check out Tom Woods is Liberty classroom. Tom and a really great group of professors and experts have put together an entire education of everything they didn’t teach you in school but should have follow through from the link in the margin at Scott horton.org. For Tom Woods is Liberty classroom. You know, when you talk about how the two are indistinguishable from each other, a farmer and then Taliban foot soldier that he becomes at night. The whole thing or or doesn’t know, thing is, the guys who aren’t, are the ones you’re supposed to be protecting from the Taliban, supposedly, and to such a degree that they would prefer you to the Taliban to be their local security force. And yet, as you’re saying, it’s that hard to distinguish between them meeting innocent farmers get shot and get drone bombed constantly and so how are you supposed to win over hearts and minds when you’re killing experts Have innocent people allday?

Daniel L. Davis 13:02
Well, I mean, I’ll give you another way that that certainly is true and a big problem by itself, but there’s an even greater dynamic along those lines. And I’ll give you another example. We went on a long foot patrol through an area where we went to into a certain village and, you know, we hit our guys out in front of the patrol, it was a joint American Taliban, our Afghan Afghan patrol, you know, they were clear in the past with the bomb detection equipment to make sure we didn’t step on any mines etc. When we came into this village, and we the we met with the senior I guess the village elder who was kind of in charge of a really old guy, actually, he was blind, didn’t his his eyes had both been put out by something we never figured that out. But we were questioned them and said, Hey, you know, we’re here. We’re for you. We want to protect you. You know, are there any talent in this area? He’s like, No, absolutely not. They’re not in this part. I don’t know where they are. But y’all there’s no point in waiting on here. And so they continue to have some Conversations through the interpreter. And while we’re doing that, we had some of our other troops had been doing a perimeter sweep around the village, and they actually captured a Taliban who was who was potentially planning on. Yeah, probably he was just doing some reconnaissance, but he got caught. And he had bomb making materials on him. So he was right there next to it. So you know, we’re like, okay, so there’s no talent here. But here’s one right here, who was probably had been in the village before we got there had just gone outside, but but we had been captured. And upon further examination, they said, Look, man, we don’t like the Taliban. We’re victims of them. But if I do anything for you, as soon as you take your little patrol and walk out of town, guess what happens? They come right back in and nothing, they’ll punish anyone who did anything for you. He goes, You know, I know that you guys are here. And when you’re in the village, no one can do anything. But the minute that you leave, then we become vulnerable again, the Afghan government itself can’t protect us. Because all they do is all these strategic points they have, they basically stay in those little points. So outside of that in the in the countryside, no one’s there to protect them. So they don’t lack the Taliban. They don’t want to be part of it, because they didn’t last, you know, in the 90s when they were running the place. But they know that we’re only going to be there temporarily, however, temporary turns out to be defined. And so they’re not going to turn against the Taliban because then they know they’re powerless to stop once we walk out the door. So that exam or exposes the real conundrum that the population has that they can’t rely on their own security forces to protect them. They definitely can’t rely on us. They don’t like the Taliban. But what are they going to do? They’re not going to turn against the Taliban because, you know, the Taliban is always there. It’s going to be there because for the most part, it’s fellow Afghan citizens, so they are from there. And so that again, just strongly reinforces how this cannot be one military.

Scott Horton 16:00
Well, you know, this is one of the big criticisms from the Hawks about Obama’s policy of the surge was that well, it would have worked fine, except that they announced the big deadline in advance that we’re only doing this for 11 months. And then come July 2011, we’re going to start drawing down and miracle a miracle. So Obama actually stuck with that thing. He gave him a couple of months delay or something, but otherwise stuck to the timetable. And they said, Well, you know, that’s the problem is they should have done the surge and but made it essentially indefinite, and let the Taliban know that we can wait them out, which just turns the whole reality on its head, that the Americans are really the indigenous security forces there. And that the Taliban are the foreign invaders, when in fact, the Taliban aren’t from Taliban to stand next door. That’s where they’re from the Helmand Province. That’s their land.

Daniel L. Davis 16:56
Right and, you know, let’s examine how that goes dead. Especially For the Hawks who love to point that, that kind of thing, let’s look at how that deadline was even formed. And there’s a great description of that whole process in Jonathan ultras book about Obama during this period, which I have talked to some of the participants in that meeting in those meetings, who was mentioned in the book and asked him how accurate he was. And they said upwards of 75%. It’s that’s pretty close to how it actually went down the way he described it. And the key part of that is that Obama had no intention of getting into forever war. He didn’t want to do something that didn’t have a chance to work. So he, Pip pointedly looked at both. I believe it was a McChrystal and Petraeus who at the time was CENTCOM commander, and said point blank. Can this be done in the timeframes that we talked about here? I think it was, I think it was 18 months of open ended stuff and then a draw down until July 2011. He said, Can we get this done with this? amount of troops. Is this the right inputs portray us absolutely said yes. He said yes in public. And Gates said yes.

Scott Horton 18:09
Now when Secretary defense Gates was in on it with

Daniel L. Davis 18:12
them, and oh, yeah, gates, and then Secretary of State Clinton were the other two that were there. So those four were arm and arm, basically, not basically, but directly telling the president Yes, we can do this. Yes, we can do it with these resources. Yes, we can do it with this timeline. And Obama said, okay, but nobody’s going to come back in July of 2011. This ain’t working and say we need more time or more troops. Right. And all of them nodded. Yes, absolutely. So these people who were the leading hawks and desire to do this, were the ones who were on the record and not just in you know, reporting the book, but in front of congressional testimony and elsewhere, said yes, we can do it. Yes, this numbers good. But now then, after it predictably failed. Now they want to come back and say number one, didn’t get enough. troops. Number two didn’t have enough time. And you know, Obama did it with this date. Yeah, the date was given to him by you by the leading advocates of the war Hawk people. So you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say yes to it here and then say, oh, but it was your fault when it didn’t work that you sit. But that’s you know, that’s that’s just the the way things work, because they don’t take responsibility for anything. Everybody else is always at fault. And they still want to go back, even if even now, they just want to continue to do what for two decades has been an abysmal failure. And they just want to do it harder and longer. It’s insane.

Scott Horton 19:37
Yep. And in the Afghan papers, as published by the Washington Post there, Petraeus just lies about this and says that Obama just spraying the 18 month timetable on him at the last minute basically just forced him to concede which is not the reporting of as you say, jonathan alter, but there’s also Obama’s wars, which is really open bombers war. The bob woodward book is just all about this, the politics of the fight over the Afghan surge. And also those two reporters over David Petraeus, his words

Daniel L. Davis 20:13
that don’t fly either, even if Obama did spring and he didn’t. But let’s say that even if he did, and is that a valid defense? No, you are the military commander, you’re the one with all the experience. If you don’t think 18 months can work, then you tell the commander in chief, no, this won’t work. I don’t think you can work in here. And we’ll do the best we can but it won’t work. That’s not what happened. So you don’t get to hide behind that. You know, Monday morning quarterback look in the past because you messed it up. Then you had the ability at the time, even with the excuse you’re claiming to either fix it or to not stand behind it. And you did neither of those things. So you have no excuse now.

Scott Horton 21:04
Yeah. And by the way, there are plenty of people who knew better than today. Do this stupid search in the first place, including Barack Obama, as you said, you know, he already knew better than this and gave into them for political reasons. He had to deal with Lindsey Graham and john mccain in the Senate. He had to deal with the threat that Petraeus, McChrystal AND gates would resign and make him look weak. And so he rolled over and gave in to them. And politically, it worked. The the, you know, Obama voters of America, they didn’t mind one bit. And yet he was able to, you know, completely bribe away an entire line of attack from his Republican opponents. When is McCain and Graham agreed that as long as you give us at least 30 more thousand, then we’ll leave you alone on it and stuck to their end of the deal there.

Daniel L. Davis 21:46
Yep, that’s how it worked out.

Scott Horton 22:42
But you know, Kelly flay hosts at the American Conservative magazine and Colonel gn Gentile or however you say, his name, Gentilly, whatever. And then of course, Colonel Let’s McGregor and all kinds of experts but everybody@antiwar.com and consortium news calm and wherever else. We all knew that this could never work. Gareth Porter, you know, the great journalist, we covered this thing. And the idea that Oh yeah, David Petraeus is going to have the Taliban on their knees with a bloody nose signing to his dictates, like the Japanese on the battleship Missouri. By July of 2011, is a ridiculous joke. It’s an obvious lie in the first place. Of course, Matthew Whoa, before they decided this, Matthew, who gave Obama all the out that he needed. As a former Marine Captain on a State Department expert over there saying this is not going to work. We should not do this. Here’s porn men into a volcano for no reason at all here, and he still did it anyway. So this isn’t all just hindsight. You know, this is as obvious as could be at the time. To those who cared about it, right. Alright, so let’s talk about Trump’s peace deal. But first is escalation because they rolled him the same way that they did Obama. In fact, Obama held out to the end of November, Trump gave in by August 2017 said finally gonna have 10,000 more troops and ordered a massive escalation in the air war there, which is something that’s hardly been covered because there’s no media out in the Afghan countryside. But we end up finding out sort of by the end of the year, when they inventory how many sorties and how many bombs dropped that Trumps when killing 10s of thousands of Afghans in the air war since 2017.

Daniel L. Davis 23:42
Yeah, and and towards what end? I mean, it’s, there’s, I think there’s certain periods here just in the last six months or so, where it was the the highest concentration of bombing even higher than during the surge lose 100,000 Americans on the ground and it’s just stunning. And yet you See the physical result on the ground is what? The Afghan Government losing ground, not gaining anything. So obviously the bombing has no positive impact whatsoever. It hasn’t driven the Taliban to make a deal to the contrary, Taliban remain in the strong position right now, which is why they can, you know, hold out for you know, really hot, good deals, and cannot agree to something they don’t like, and let the work continue to go on. Even though we may want to have a peace deal, because they have all the strategic advantages right now and have no incentive or motivation to make the serious compromises necessary to get to an in state that they don’t like. So they’re okay with going further. Because they see that we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna stick around there forever. I mean, Trump is clearly signal we’re on the way out, so that leaves even less motivation to them. But here’s the thing, Scott, we don’t need to be doing any of this negotiation with the Taliban. We don’t need a predicate our presence on the ground, no matter how How these negotiations come out. In fact, we shouldn’t even be making any. And that should be something that the Afghan government absolutely doesn’t, we should facilitate that, you know, help them out to any degree that we can, you know, been working with both sides to have it. But our military presence there needs to end and it needs to ends on our term and on our timetable. And then those people on the ground who have to live for the next 500 years, you know, they’ve got to be the ones to figure this out. They’ve got to both sides have to say how can we live because even the Taliban, even the, you know, some of the people in the Afghan government that they are sick of war, they don’t want to keep going on this for another 40 years. But until they each have their own motivation to make whatever compromises are necessary, they’re just not going to so our presence there extends the war. It there’s not even a possibility that it will end it but it can extend it into perpetuity as long as we have there to have the backs of the Afghan government with no strings attached. Maybe that’s starting to change now, but it needs to just absolutely end.

Scott Horton 26:12
Hmm. You know. So there were some reports by let’s say Kimberly Dozier had one. And there were a couple of more that said that there were secret annexes to this afghan peace deal and that the Taliban are actually gonna let America keep some special operations forces there after all, which just sounded like fiction to me, they’ve been holding out all these years to go ahead and concede the presence of American troops. Or what do you think was behind that?

Daniel L. Davis 26:32
I mean, this. I can, of course, I don’t have any insider information on this particular aspect of it. But based on what I do know, in the history of the place, I mean, I can see where Taliban would make any promises at all. Oh, yeah, sure. If you get rid of all the main combat troops then yeah, whatever. You can keep some, you know SDF behind no one that they had no intention of actually allowing that but if they could say anything to get more troops to leave, you know, then that would be in their advantage. And They could work with a much smaller group later, etc. Or hope that they would be driven out. But I can’t see them suddenly radically changing course and saying that America could keep Special Forces their long term, when that goes against everything they’ve ever stood for or asked for. But you know, we’ll see.

Scott Horton 27:18
Yeah, I guess that makes sense. If they were just making the bet that well, they’re not going to leave Special Operations guys here without adequate force protection. And so if we say, Sure, but you can only keep 1000 guys or whatever, they’re gonna go ahead and pull them all out anyway, something like that. I could even see it as just you know, traveling or not traveling is but sort of propaganda for the American hawks that don’t worry, they’re gonna let us keep some guys here. When and, you know, I guess we’ll see how it goes in a year from now.

Daniel L. Davis 27:59
Because there are those who are like, they’re just so desperate to not lose troops anywhere. That okay if the worst case scenario is that we can at least least keep special operators on the ground, then we’ll take that over nothing. Which is really troubling to me because that seems like that keeping troops deployed combat troops deployed all over the place in the world anywhere that we got them. They’re afraid to pull off of anywhere and black, they’re terrified of that or something instead of facilitating it, because we should seek, you know, peaceful relations anywhere that we can. But that just shows you because you see that absolutely a play in Iraq, in Syria. And even to some degree in the Yemen situation, definitely throughout Africa. They’re terrified of losing any opportunity to keep combat troops on the ground, even though you can’t tie a single one of them to American national security. And they all need to end.

Scott Horton 29:19
Yeah, and now so I’m glad that you frame it that way. Because this is such an interesting piece. It’s just, it says so much between the lines here well and in between Print to NBC News. Trump tells advisors, US should pull troops as Afghanistan COVID-19 outbreak looms. And the article is about how Trump is telling his staff. Let’s just go ahead and pull all the troops out. Now, who cares if the deal says we stay another, you know, three quarters of a year, another year. Let’s just go ahead and go. There’s a big outbreak in Afghanistan. We don’t want to get our guys caught up in that. And the whole frame of the article is about how this is obviously crazy. And this nut is off on another one of his tears. And will the responsible adults be able to talk him out of it or not, is essentially the entire framing of the thing. All of his advisors are doing everything they can to prevent him from making this terrible and rash mistake. Because after all, what might happen if America left Afghanistan, Danny Yeah,

Daniel L. Davis 29:58
well The framing that they continue on if you if you I’m sure you notice in the article was they said okay if you want to pull the troops out because of that then you’re gonna have to pull them out of Italy and all these other places all

Scott Horton 30:11
ight then finally we’re talking sense.

Daniel L. Davis 30:14
Hmm Oh, that we don’t need any in Italy they don’t need our defense. Sure let’s pull them out of there too. But that’s it. This one for another another podcast for another day. But the it just shows that they’re they’re so myopic on keeping the troops there at all costs, that the actual ramifications to America don’t seem to matter what they always default to have. I mean, from the Talon Petraeus back in 2010. All the way through to today is that there will be a new 911 lindsey graham is the most famous one for saying that and convincing Trump and scaring him that if there’s a new 911 and it happens because you pulled out john you’re watching you know be stained on your reputation cetera and that has kind of tempered him from not doing what he’s you know what he really wants to do. But it’s Actually detailed in a paper that’s going to be released possibly today or tomorrow your defense priorities. That is hogwash. The original 911 didn’t happen because of Afghanistan, it was incidental to the process. And in any new now, you know, a new terrorist attack won’t happen because of a piece of dirt in Afghanistan, as opposed to the other millions of square miles across the rest of the globe where these things can happen. It’s absurd to suggest that that tiny little.on the planet is somehow special over the rest of the entire planet. If we can do that, then we’re going to be safe. That’s crazy. We have other ways to keep us safe, no matter where the threat comes from, through our global intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, our ability to strike any direct threat to America anywhere in the world. That’s what keeps us safe. Not troops on the ground, anywhere.

Scott Horton 31:50
Yeah. Well, and you know, if we’d stop backing al Qaeda, like the current war in Yemen, and that probably would help to

Daniel L. Davis 31:58
Yeah, it certainly does. eminence is not even an international interest in any way, shape or form. The last thing I think we should be doing is helping Saudi Arabia do anything because they’re not working on us. You know, they’re not working for our benefit. So I think we need to be, you know, actually employing if you want to do it, get down to the brass tacks of, you know, something that benefits America first. This is not it.

Scott Horton 32:22
Yeah. All right. Well, listen, we’ll be keeping our eyes open for that new piece at defense priorities. What’s the title?

Daniel L. Davis 32:30
I haven’t actually seen the final title yet. It’s still been in the works but it’s a it’s basically a new kind of a deep dive on Afghanistan explore examining the the core fundamental issues and how it relates to American national security, what the costs and benefits are of both staying an leaving.

Scott Horton 32:55
Okay, great. Well, make sure I’m on your email list or I’ll make sure to double check anyway and see for when that runs and we’ll definitely run it at anti war calm. Thank you again for coming on the show. Danny. Appreciate it. A lot of play. Thanks, Scott. All right, you guys. That’s the great Daniel L. Davis, retired Army Lieutenant Colonel and now preach in peace at defense priorities. The Scott Horton show, Antiwar Radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com antiwar.com ScottHorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org

Scott Horton 0:10
All right, y’all welcome it’s Scott Horton Show. I am the director of the Libertarian Institute editorial director of antiwar.com, author of the book Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. And I’ve recorded more than 5000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at ScottHorton.org. You can also sign up to the podcast feed. The full archive is also available at youtube.com/ScottHortonShow. All right, you guys introducing William Van Wagenen. He is regular writer for the libertarian Institute. And he’s got another one on Syria here. The Salafist roots of the Syrian uprising. Welcome back to the show, William How you doing?

William Van Wagenen 0:55
Hey, I’m doing well appreciate appreciate you letting me on. How are you?

Scott Horton 0:59
I’m doing great. Pretty You’re joining us here today and listen to another masterpiece. And you sure don’t what I don’t know, eight or 10 of these for the institute so far, and they’re just great. Especially going back to the early history of the Syrian war there. So here you’re addressing the all important question, I guess, of the origin of the war. The common narrative is that peaceful protesters went outside to protest, and then the government shot them and that radicalize them and the protest movement turned into a war. Is that about right?

William Van Wagenen 1:36
Yeah, so that’s the, the standard narrative. And in that the thing that never gets mentioned, is, you know, what was going on in the Salafist community in Syria at the time, in that mainstream narrative, there were just the peaceful democratic secular protesters and there’s no mention made of the salt This community, what Salafist activists were up to what Muslim Brotherhood activists were up to. And so there’s a, if you just take a closer look, it turns out that Salafist community was really active. And they were, in my view, in the view of some of the scholars that I Syrian scholars that I cited in the paper, it was, it was Salafist activists that were driving the early protests to a large degree. And then also there were Salafist militants, who were, you know, attacking Syrian security forces and police, you know, from the beginning. So they were really launching an insurrection, armed insurrection from the beginning rather than say, there being again, the secular democratic protesters who were then violently suppressed by the government. And then as a response to that, then suddenly people decided to take up arms become militarized, and then suddenly As if out of thin air all became, you know, Salafis and jihadists and started creating all the armed groups that, you know, we see later on and that are acknowledged, but actually all that stuff was going on from from the very beginning.

Scott Horton 3:15
Alright, so now let’s rewind a little bit back, I used to interview Eric Margolis and people like him, real experts on the Middle East back during Iraq War Two. And we would talk about how the neocons crazy plan as David warms or put it in coping with crumbling states is to expedite the chaotic collapse of the Baathist states, Iraq and then in this case, he was referring to Syria so that we could, you know, better determine how things should be in the future after we’re done. Destroying what’s there now, and I distinctly remember talking with Eric Margolis about this and probably would have been oh five or oh six at the latest. Asking him. Well, But so who’s there to replace the Assad regime? If they did get rid of it? And I remember after asking Patrick Coburn and others this back then, and they all had the same answer, which is, there is no organized political force in Baathist controlled Syria, that could possibly replace them other than possibly the Muslim Brotherhood. They were the only people who really had an organization ready to go. And they’re perceived as being al Qaeda light, essentially. Sunni Islamised only in most places, not as violent as the Ballade Knights so then the argument It was like a joke. So you get the Muslim Brotherhood if you’re lucky, but you might end up getting al Qaeda in Iraq. And then of course, just a few years later, that’s exactly what happened. But so if you want go back and talk about the the rise in the power of The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. And then, you know, as my follow up question to that is, what was the role of literal al Qaeda in Iraq at that point? At the start of the war in say the spring of 2011, or At what point did Sark Howie’s group then calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq? before they started going by on those right in Syria, what point did they come across and really start making their presence known?

William Van Wagenen 5:29
Yeah, sure. So, again, that’s something to keep in mind that the Muslim Brotherhood had started an armed insurrection against the Syrian government starting essentially in 1979, that lasted until 1982. That started with this famous massacre at the Alma white army cadets in Aleppo in 1979. And that essentially ended with the battle in Hama in 1982. And ever since that time, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood has been repressed in Syria during that period 1979 82. Again, the Muslim Brotherhood started in armed insurrection. And it was important to know that, for example, one of their chief ideologues named Syed How was writing things at the time citing even Tamia the medieval Salafist scholar who advocated genocide against Allah White’s for being heretics Muslim Brotherhood leaders like cite how in you know 7982 were basically advocating killing Allah whites for their for religious reasons and committing genocide and things like that. So that’s kind of the background and so in 2011 came around you had a lot of these same same To the same movement that was kind of ready to try to restart that war from 79 to 82. They wanted to reignite or restart that war again in 2011. And there were a lot of characters, you know, from the 70s and the 80s that reemerged. One person, for example, is a noted jihadi named Abu Khalid is Suri who fought with the Muslim Brotherhood in the 80s or, and then ended up going to Afghanistan. You know, fighting with al Qaeda, basically, during the 80s there, everyone knows that story. And then when the uprising in 2011, was about to get underway, this same person, I will call it a story, who was very famous. He helped established the earliest armed group in Syria that thought once the uprising started, which is called 100. Shawn, and he received money from Al Qaeda from in Afghanistan and received a lot of support, it looks like from Saudi intelligence and from Salafist networks in Saudi Arabia. And so this is like March, April 2011, is when Sean was getting started. They were attacking Syrian security forces and police. They were getting foreign fighters coming from Saudi Arabia to help them getting weapons from Saudi Qatari intelligence, again with the approval of, of the US of the CIA. So as far as the question goes, but when did al Qaeda become involved in the Syrian war? The usual answer is that the franchise the Syrian franchise of al Qaeda, is job hunting mystery. Or the Minister of front, which was started when the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, Baghdadi sent the leader of Misra Jelani to Syria supposedly in like August 2011. And then the Nusra Front didn’t actually announce their existence until January 2012, with some pretty big bombings in Damascus. So everybody kind of assumes that we’ll have the Mr. Front, the official al Qaeda franchise didn’t announce its presence in the war until January 2012, that al Qaeda must not have been part of the uprising or the war until that point. And Previous to that time, all the people fighting against the government must have been the secular democratic revolutionaries. And it wasn’t until you know almost a year in that al Qaeda really got involved in so that the insurgency went from secular and democratic and orientation with Allegedly with the Free Syrian Army. And only over time, did it transform into a jihadist insurgency when al Qaeda, you know, started taking officially announced its involvement in January 2012. But when you look at the the formation of Shazam, again, their own fighters and commanders have acknowledged that they were forming armed groups in March and April and May in 2011. And there are, of course, Syrian soldiers and security forces that were being killed during that period of time. And again, it was a longtime jihadi bahala de Sori, who helped start the group and who was receiving money and funding from Al Qaeda. So that essentially was like the original involvement of al Qaeda was really the armed group are a sham. But that just gets papered over looked over and people imagine that again, Al Qaeda didn’t get involved until January 2012. When job hunting really started making its activities open.

Scott Horton 11:05
Yeah, now I’m sorry, I have this one from November but I’m sure that there was another one from earlier in 2011 by Alistair crook, former EMI six officer turned journalist Greg guy friend of the show. And he was reporting in here that well, Prince Bandar is sending off to hotties to go and fight in the war. And from here, that’s pretty much all you need to know, is we already know from just a couple of years before this that any Saudis fighting in Iraq War Two, we’re fighting on the side of the Sunni based insurgency and probably as part of Zarqawi group against the US there and their Shia allies in that war. And so what more do you need to know at that point, then Never mind that there are some Islam is involved in this thing. But Prince Bandar of Saudi intelligence is helping run The thing and get the whole deal going again, it’s going to look just like the Sunni insurgency in Iraq only on the other side of the border here.

William Van Wagenen 12:07
Right. and former Bush administration official john Hannah, who was a national security adviser to dick cheney fire, remember? Correct. He wrote an article in foreign policy in April 2011. Where he alluded to that, that, you know, there was a chance that Prince Bandar was going to fire up the old Sunni jihadi network and point it in the general direction of Iran. And john Hannah, in the article, he basically argued that, you know, hey, we Bandar is going to do this, and we need to make sure that when this happens, it’s done in a way that aligns with US foreign policy, and that undermines the Syrian government specifically. So even then, you know, there was Is the indication that, again, Saudi intelligence was going to get involved or was already involved that Prince Bandar was at the head of it, and that there would be, you know, a Salafist insurgency. And again, that was already going on, but it just wasn’t acknowledged in, in the press. But john Hannigan in that article basically alluded to that and of course, years later, those admissions were made, you know, john mccain famously said, Thank God for Bandar. And at the time to, you know, the CIA, the Obama administration was asking cutter to cut trees intelligence to send weapons to al Qaeda affiliated fighters in Libya. I know, your listeners probably know this story, of course, about the Libyan Islamic fighting group. So that was all going on at the same time in the spring of of 2011. And, you know, it was going on in both Libya and Syria, but in both places, you know, the press tried to essentially obscure all of that and go with the narrative that there were secular, peaceful protesters. Clearly there were many people like that, that were protesting. But the Salafist were there from the beginning. They were, you know, chanting, chanting these sectarian and even genocidal slogans at times, like ello eyes to the grave Christians to Beirut. So the signs were all there. But again, the the narrative, as you know, just tried to obscure that and just make it seem like the Syrian government was just for no reason cracking down on peaceful protesters, even though actually they were responding to an arm solve this insurgency for for for that entire time, which again, doesn’t mean that the Syrian government did, you know, kill any protesters. Most governments do that. Sadly. I mean, we saw that in Iraq and the recent protests over the last six months, lots of protesters getting killed. So it’s not to say that Syrian Government never killed anybody. But definitely the the narrative that that was promoted was totally was just was was totally distorted.

Scott Horton 15:04
Hold on just one second Be right back. So you’re constantly buying things from amazon.com. Wow, that makes sense. They bring it right to your house. So what you do though, is click through from the link in the right hand margin at Scott Horton. org and I’ll get a little bit of a kickback from Amazon’s into the sale won’t cost you a thing. Nice little way to help support the show. Again, that’s right there in the margin at Scott Horton. org. Hey, I’ll check it out. The libertarian Institute. That’s me and my friends have published three great books this year. First is no quarter, the ravings of William Norman Greg. He was the best one of us. Now he’s gone. But this great collection is a truly fitting legacy for his fight for freedom. I know you’ll love it. And there’s coming to Palestine by the great Sheldon Richmond. It’s a collection of 40 important essays he’s written over the years about the truth behind the Israel Palestine conflict. You’ll learn so much and how highly valued this definitive libertarian take on the dispossession of the Palestinians and the reality of their brutal occupation. And last but not least, is the great Ron Paul. The Scott Horton show interviews 2004 through 2019 interview transcripts of all of my interviews of the good doctor over the years on all the wars, money taxes, the police state and more. So how do you like that? Pretty good, right? Find them all at libertarian institute.org/books. You need stickers for your band your business will Rick and the guys over at the bumpersticker.com have got you covered great work. Greg prices, sticky things with things printed on them. Whatever you need the bumpersticker.com We’ll get it done right for you. The bumper sticker.com Well, and I’m glad you brought up john mccain. he famously crossed the border into Syria to go and meet with the northern storm brigade. And they were already known as being kidnappers of Lebanese Shia, who had Who were pilgrims on a religious trip? And you know, you could check the dates. It was almost certain it was in April of 2012 that he went over there when, in March of 2012. The northern storm brigade had talked to Time magazine on video and had bragged that Yeah, we fought in Iraq war to against the Americans What of it? And this was a month before McCain went and met with them. And then it was after that, that we found out that the northern storm brigade were the ones who had kidnapped Steven sotloff and then sold him to ISIS for $25,000 or was it $20,000 who then cut his head off as one of the reasons that got the war started was the murder of salt loft, by john mccain’s friends. Well, by john mccain’s friends, friends in the Islamic State.

William Van Wagenen 15:29
Yeah, it’s a it’s obviously pretty disturbing and infuriating, but that’s kind of a An indication of how it went where when the Salafist insurgency started again, all the early armed groups were Salafist, even those fighting under the, the moniker of the Free Syrian Army. Not that there weren’t any secular brigades, but they were just totally fringe and minor in influence. All the biggest Free Syrian Army groups were Salafist militias. JCL Islam led by is around the loose was, you know, one of the most notable examples of that, obviously, are Sean which didn’t fight under the Free Syrian Army moniker, but they were a Salafist group, and they were, you know, the first arm group to begin with, but the the the the Syrians that had fought in the past in Afghanistan and Iraq. You know, some of these guys were still around, and they basically provided support to the newly formed Salafist militias. Were getting a lot of money from the Gulf. And again, presumably from Italy. And agencies. Also the future movement in Lebanon was sending a lot of weapons to the political party led by Assad Hariri. So all these groups are popping up because all the money is just funneling in creating a lot of entrepreneurs, right? If there’s a ton of if there’s a ton of, you know, demand for armed groups, because the money is flowing in and lots of groups will be created. But again, it was these veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Syria, or sorry, in Iraq, etc. that were there to provide, you know, training logistics and things like that to the newly formed groups. And that was originally why the Mr. Front had its name. nostra means in Arabic could mean victory or it could mean support. But in the case of job hunting, it was meant as this like the support group for, you know, these Syrian armed groups on the ground and so that’s why there was so much easy collaboration and cooperation between job hunt industrial when it formally announced itself and all of the other armed groups because, again, before minister announced its involvement in January 2012. I mean, there were still a lot of these jihadi veterans that were, had already been there providing, you know, training and in support, bomb making capabilities, teaching bomb making skills and things like that to the newly formed armed groups. And that’s, um, you know, I’ve got another article that it’s not going to be too long before I get it done. I think that talks more about that and how, you know, the Free Syrian Army, for example, it’s always assumed that the fighters for the Free Syrian Army were army defectors, but there are lots of admissions by pro opposition figures. That suggests Actually, that’s totally false. I mean, that was just a myth that they were mostly defectors. In fact, if Syrian Syrian soldiers tried to defect to the opposition groups, A lot of times they would be investigated for allegedly having blood on their hands and they would probably be be killed in a lot of cases. Because again, the the Salafist armed groups, including the Free Syrian Army groups looked at them as you know, Baptist atheists as their enemies. So there really were hardly any defections. From the army. A lot of people deserted and left but they did desert. They didn’t join the Free Syrian Army, because these were Salafist groups that were, again getting help and support from these jihadi Veterans.

Now ISIS got the worst publicity because again, the beheadings and of course, they’re conquering of all of western Iraq in 2014. But when they split from nosara, it was really nostra staying loyal to al Qaeda, and Imanol Zawahiri while ISIS was breaking off, to go ahead and do their own thing against the wall hurries wishes and advice, going ahead and creating the caliphate now, which he warned won’t work. Because the Americans will just pop it off the face of the earth that was why they were picking on the far enemy in the first place anyway, but the aisle notes were front which is now high at two rear all Sean there’s still blood oath loyal to Iman al-zawahiri the butcher of New York City, correct?

Yeah. But maybe the only place out differ with you is that I, I don’t think this split happened as a result of loyalty to one group or another. If you want, we could talk about this a little, maybe a little

Scott Horton 22:31
it fighting over the oil in the east of the country there.

William Van Wagenen 22:34
Yeah. So Theo Padnos, it’d be an interesting guy for you to interview if you haven’t already, maybe you did and I missed it. But he was kidnapped who said he was? His name is Theo Padnos, okay. No, I don’t know. He was a journalist. He, I think he had a PhD in literature and he studied Arabic in Yemen. And then when the the Syria war started, I think sometime in 2012, he went to southern Turkey like a lot of people in wanting to become a journalist and he found some Free Syrian Army guys that would smuggle him into the country. You know, give him an interview and he could start writing and you know, pitching pieces to get published in western the western press. Turns out the Free Syrian Army guys were basically al Qaeda guys and they they they kidnapped him they handed him over to the Mr. Front, and then Theo Padnos was kidnapped for two straight years. And he traveled with a lot of top commanders as their captive. And he says that when there was the split between nostra and ISI between Jelani and Baghdadi, this was right as the Mr. Front was capturing the oil fields in eastern Syria, the Omari field the fields that the United States is occupying now with with Kurdish forces, but co Padnos makes clear that the reason that Jelani and Baghdadi had a falling out in Jelani didn’t want to, you know acknowledge being part of the Islamic State of Iraq and how the two organizations merge into ISIS. The reason Jelani wanted to keep those two separate was that nostra had just barely with the help of the Free Syrian Army taken over all these oil fields. And so that was just a massive amount of revenue that Jelani was going to get. And if he merged with officially with Baghdadi to become ISIS, basically he would lose all of that revenue and all that power and all that will go to Baghdadi so rather than there being some like fight over who should we be loyal to or an ideological differences or anything like this it was really just a fight over oil revenues in oil fields. Baghdadi lost initially but later ISIS was able to table the takeover those oil fields from Austria and and you know, helped establish the caliphate in in eastern Syria. But it was really just yeah, that struggle over oil but again, you know, ever since I emerged on the scene and they’re murdering these hostages and doing all these terrible things on video. There was in the media this idea, hey, you can demonize ISIS, but then nostra was, you know treated as moderate right and revolutionaries and blah, blah blah even though I mean they were the same, the same ideology, the same organization, maybe ISIS was a little bit crazier, but just because ISIS is 300% crazy doesn’t mean this for guys are moderate, you know, maybe means they’re 200% crazy.

Scott Horton 25:30
I’m sorry. We’re all out of time, and I got to run right now. But um, this is such a great piece. Everybody, please go and look at this at the libertarian Institute, libertarian institute.org, the Salafist roots of the Syrian uprising. We only touched on about 5% of the thing here. It’s really great. So please go and check it out. That’s William Van Wagenen and thank you again, sir.

William Van Wagenen 25:51
Hey you’re welcome.

Scott Horton 25:52
The Scott Horton show anti war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 FM in LA APSradio.com antiwar.com ScottHorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org.

Scott Horton 0:00
For Pacifica radio, April 26 2020. I’m Scott Horton. This is anti war radio.

Alright y’all Welcome to show it is anti war radio. I’m your host, Scott Horton. I’m the editorial director of anti war calm and author of the book fool’s errand time to end the war in Afghanistan. You can find my full interview archive, more than 5000 of them now going back to 2003 at Scott horton.org. All right, you guys introducing Mitchell Plitnick. He is the president of rethinking foreign policy and he’s got a new piece at the Quincy Institute for Responsible statecraft. And it’s called Israel’s unity government protects Netanyahu from prosecution paves the way for annexation. Welcome back to the show, Mitchell. How you doing?

Mitchell Plitnick 1:03
I’m doing all right. How are you?

Scott Horton 1:04
I’m doing great. appreciate you joining us today here. So first of all, can you take us back here? This is the third election or the fourth election that they’ve had in a row. They’re trying to figure out who can form a majority in the Israeli Knesset, and they finally got it done by having the two major opponents compromise and join in a coalition government together. Is that it?

Mitchell Plitnick 1:26
Right. This is the third election in just over a year. And you know, in the end, what they came to was something they could have come to after the first election, if they, you know, had so chosen. It came about because some right wing parties, particularly the Israel as our home used to have a new party of Avigdor Lieberman decided they would not join a coalition with Netanyahu. So that sort of tipped a balance. The problem from the other side was that in order for the opposition led by Benny guns to form a government, they would have had to have the support of The joint list, which is mostly it’s a coalition of parties that are mostly parties of Palestinian citizens of Israel. And that was difficult because some of the people involved including guns himself, were not very comfortable with getting support from Arab parties.

Scott Horton 2:18
Yeah, and now, I mean, was it the case that if he had gone ahead with the joint list that other parts of his coalition would have dropped out? Or he actually could have been the Prime Minister, if only he had made a deal with them?

Mitchell Plitnick 2:29
Well, it would have been, it would have been difficult, it’s hard to say that other parts of the coalition would have necessarily dropped out. What we saw was that two members of his own party his own guns, his own blue and white party, bolted at the idea of even just getting support from the joint list. Now, this was about the joint list supporting guns from outside of the government. So it would have been a minority government, but would have had the support of the joint list to defend itself against no confidence votes had it actually I managed to get the government that would have been been approved by the President and the Knesset.

Scott Horton 3:06
So in other words, you’re saying definitely a difficult road, they would have had a majority in the Knesset to have the government but they would have not gotten any minister posts within swear say,

Mitchell Plitnick 3:15
exactly. I mean, they would not have officially been part of the government, but they just would have gotten something from that government when one would think in exchange for assurances that they would protect it against no confidence votes. But even at that, it would they would have only been, I mean, even with that the joint list included they would have only had about 62 out of the 120 seats in an optimal situation. So it was a government that could easily have been brought down and would have over almost any dispute because it would have depended on parts of even the blue and white coalition, such as the talent party is a right wing party led by Moshe alone. They were not They’re all comfortable with with the joint list, but they were willing to go along with it to get Netanyahu out same with Lieberman’s party. So it wouldn’t have taken long for something to happen to shatter that coalition. So it wasn’t a very realistic option. But it was certainly something that gums could have pursued if he wants to stick to his campaign promise of not joining government led by Netanyahu.

Scott Horton 4:22
And now, it’s interesting, right, that this is not the law in Israel. But this is the tradition that so far any would be prime minister would prefer to lose and let the other guy be prime minister rather than joining a coalition with these Arab parties.

Mitchell Plitnick 5:33
I mean, essentially, I mean, that that I don’t think that’s the way any of them would characterize it, of course. And I don’t think in fairness, I don’t think that is the way they think about it. But in practice, certainly that’s the way it works out. They, the the mainstream parties do not want to be in in a coalition with the parties. Now they will say that is because those error parties are not Zionist, which is which is true. And there’s a certain validity to that since virtually all of the Jewish parties are Zionist, except for the religious parties which have religious objections, Zionism, but not political ones, so on the political questions of the Jewish state, they usually go along with design as parties not just cynically, but but you know, honestly. But that the the reality is that that people are uncomfortable with the idea of the Jewish state, being in part run by some of its non Jewish citizens. And this is Look, I mean, it’s the inevitable result when you have in an ethnic cracy. That’s the kind of attitude you’re going to get. And the notion that you can somehow have equal rights under those circumstances is just, you know, it just doesn’t work out that way in any ethniccracy.

Scott Horton 5:56
Well, just put the shoe on the other foot for a second here and we have a history like this In the United States, but just think of how absolutely intolerable it would be for the Democratic or Republican Party Coalition’s to say, Oh, yeah, but no Jews no blacks.

Mitchell Plitnick 6:14
Of course, there was a time when they did say that. And, you know, I think that’s where you want to place, I think, a little bit of hope for the future because there was a time that Democrats, you know, would say, you know, we will not have blacks in our Congress, even though they were unable to necessarily Stop it. But they certainly isolated anyone who was, you know, African American from any sort of college and even today, you still have, you know, I would say racism in our government, but that, you know, in very practical ways, so there’s a way that we can hope that this changes in the future, and we can look at our own past and see that that in some ways it has changed, not to the point of equality, but certainly better than what you have where people can expect At least say we will not sit in the government with Arabs. So one has to hope. And I think you can also look even at this election and say, the jointless managed to get 15 seats. And they did better than expected because they were able to really rally a lot of the Palestinian citizens of Israel to vote for them. But also, because there was an unprecedented number of Jews in Israel who voted for them. So there are people who recognize that any progressive future for Israel depends on Arab Jewish cooperation and transcending the ethnography of Israel today.

Scott Horton 7:35
Yeah. And just for the record in the United States, they outlawed the all white primary in the 1960s, about 10 years before I wasborn.

Mitchell Plitnick 7:44
Yeah, but that’s not that long ago.

Scott Horton 7:46
Yeah, no, it’s really not. It’s that that if you check all the white hair and my beard, then you start to wonder, in the scheme of things, yeah, was quite quite a long time ago. All the kids that were hippies then are all the old right wing

Mitchell Plitnick 8:08
Exactly

All right, so now um, okay, so ganz had promised that there’s no way that he is going to join in a coalition government with Netanyahu, as you said, That’s why they had three elections. They could have made this deal back when. And I understand what you’re saying that if he had joined in the coalition with the Arab joint list that wow, that probably would have fallen apart before too long. Yeah. But still, we would have been rid of Netanyahu, and maybe actually keeping him out would have been a good enough incentive for the disparate parties to stay together in the coalition because at least they got rid of Netanyahu. Why was that so hard for him to decide that?

First, I mean, even if God had committed himself to to trying to form a government with the support of the giant list, it’s not at all certain he would have been able to succeed, as I said, just at the just with the idea floating about to have his own. Two members of his own party bolted and said we will not you know, we will not agree to support this kind of government. So that right away took away the good shot at the potential majority that they could have had. So it was it was definitely a bumpy road. And and one that if you had to bet probably would not have succeeded. Now, you know, that being said, guns didn’t really try all that hard. And I think there were a couple of reasons for that. I think one was that God is really not a politician. I don’t think that he when he came into this, he signed up for, you know, three rounds of elections in a year and a half of constant campaigning. I mean, he he’s a reluctant campaigner at best if you actually, you know, when you watch him speak publicly, it is not he’s not comfortable doing it. It’s not something he enjoys. It took him forever to come out with a platform even last year. So yeah, this is not a game that he enjoys playing anything like yeah, nothing ever does. This is nothing Yeah, whose life so I think Cuba exhausted. And then I think, you know, when the Coronavirus crisis hit, from his point of view, it gave him a way out. It gave him an excuse to say, look for the good of the country. We can’t go to more elections. And I’ve got to find some way to make an agreement with Netanyahu, just so that we can get through this crisis. How much of that was an excuse? And how much of that was sincere? I think, you know, it’s a mix. I think, as I said, I think he was exhausted. I think he was also frustrated by the fact that it really didn’t look like there was a very solid path forward to a new government. It was clear that Netanyahu was going to do anything that he could to, to hold on to power. And it just wasn’t it’s not a game that God says up to I mean, one of the reasons that Netanyahu has survived election after election is that he just hasn’t had a really strong opponent. God was the strongest one and he just couldn’t go 15 rounds with this guy.

Scott Horton 10:57
Yeah, well, which makes sense. If there’s a fanatic in Israel, it’s Benjamin Netanyahu fanatic for his own power anyway. Now, but now, so what kind of compromises were made here? You know, Netanyahu had floated a couple of weeks ago, and I think was pretty clearly lying at the time that Oh, yeah, dance agreed to join in a coalition government with me. And I promise I’ll turn over the Prime Minister shipped to him in about two years or something like that. And Dan said, Well, that’s a lie. If that’s true, how come you’re announcing it in the papers instead of sending your guys to discuss it with my guys and this and that, but then I think from what I’ve read here, they’ve made no such deal. Netanyahu does not have to step down at any point in the near future at all.

Mitchell Plitnick 11:42
No, no deal is Netanyahu will be the Prime Minister for 18 months, at which time he will switch roles with guns and become the deputy prime minister. That was an important aspect of the deal for Netanyahu because they have also made an agreement that the Deputy Prime Minister I can continue to serve, even if he’s under indictment. So members of the Knesset cannot serve if they’re indicted. They have to leave the the Knesset, the but the actual way that works is that it’s not that they have to leave, it’s that the Prime Minister has to fire them. So this was a loophole that allowed them to Yahoo despite being indicted to stay in because he’s the Prime Minister. So he doesn’t have to his you know, he would have to fire himself, which he doesn’t do and therefore, he stays in. So they’ve now added that that the Deputy Prime Minister has the same field. Essentially, they’ve changed the law so that so that the Deputy Prime Minister can also stay in government despite being indicted. That’s part of this agreement. So Netanyahu wouldn’t attend yo gets is that if he sticks to this agreement, in 18 months, he would step down and become Deputy Prime Minister still serving despite being under indictment. While he fights his legal battles, which he can, of course, prolong for years and years, that that’s what he fought for. Now, so according to the deal, yeah, he would have to step down. Nobody, literally, I have yet to find a single person who says, Yeah, sure, I believe that Netanyahu is going to step down in 18 months. Right, right, left or center, nobody believes it. Because people don’t know better. And of course, Netanyahu now has 18 months to destroy this agreement. And in 18 months, you know, one has to one has to be pretty sure that that he’s going to find a way to do just that. That’s plenty of time for him. So somewhere in there, I expect he will bring down this government he will call for new elections or do something else to to just change the nature of the deal. So that he doesn’t have to step down in 18 months, but you know it right now on paper, that is what he has to do.

And now, so have they already been And they do have the right to form this government now. And I wonder about all the different parties that made up the blue and white coalition that ganz had promised and never support Netanyahu or any of them dropping out now?

Well, yeah, the government has not been officially voted in yet. They’re still in the process of hammering out all the last details of the agreement. And those those details are still coming out. So that that is still to come, probably in within the next week. But almost immediately when God said he was going to, you know, negotiate a unity government with with Netanyahu, his blue and white coalition split. So the blue and white coalition had been him it him basically four leaders, himself, and two other former Chiefs of Staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, and most you’re alone and you’re Latina. Yeah, you’re lucky to have the Tea Party, let ya alone and the peat split off immediately they they abandoned the coalition and said we are not going to sit in this government. We’ve promised we’ve been opposing Netanyahu. And that’s what we’re going to do. You know, as many people have pointed out for both lepe and yeah, alone, it’s personal. They really really hate Netanyahu and Netanyahu has stabbed them both in the back in the past when, when each one of them has been part gotta learn used to be. Netanyahu is defense minister. He used to be his partner used to be in the coalition with Netanyahu and Antonio stabbed them both in the back, they hate him, they want him out. So for them, it’s personal. Whereas for guns, it’s a it’s a political issue. So I think that’s part of where that split comes from. But what one of the things that that does is that with half of the former blue and white coalition in the opposition, sitting with a victor Lieberman just started detainer party right now also sitting in the opposition is the Left wing merits party obviously the joint list. And also the the far right wing yamina party would all be in the opposition. So what does that add up to? It adds up to a completely incoherent opposition that, you know, would agree on on absolutely nothing except that they hate Netanyahu. So that that will mean a divided divided opposition that Netanyahu will be facing, and he has the relatively centrist guns at his side. So the way it the way it’s shattered, blue and white also means a chatter in any serious opposition to Netanyahu. His dominance for the at least for right now.

Scott Horton 16:46
Yeah, you got a hand to him. He’s good at math.

Mitchell Plitnick 16:48
He’s very good at politics. I mean, he’s he this is this is the game he plays. He plays it very, very well. Dance frankly, never stood a chance.

Scott Horton 17:41
Hey, man, you guys are gonna love No devil. No ops no ID by Hussein badhak Chani it’s a fun and interesting read all about how to run your high tech company like a good libertarian should forget all the junk read no dev no ops no it by Hussein bodek Johnny find it in the margin at Scott horton.org Hey y’all, here’s the thing, donate $100 to the Scott Horton show, and you can get a QR code commodity disc as my gift to you. It’s a one ounce silver disc with a QR code on the back you take a picture of with your phone, and it gives you the instant spot price. And lets you know what that silver that ounces silver is worth on the market and Federal Reserve Notes in real time. It’s the future of currency in the past to commodity discs.com or just go to Scott Horton. org slash donate. Hey guys, Scott Horton here for expand designs.com Harley Abbott and his group do an outstanding job designing, building and maintaining my sites. And they’ll do great work for you need a new website, go to expand design comm slash Scott and say 500 bucks. Well now, so where the rubber meets the road here, the real question is what this means for the Palestinians. And on one hand, they have a continuation of this extremely capable, Prime Minister, especially you has so much influence in the United States and that kind of thing. And yet, is also really a lightning rod in a lot of ways, too, especially in the United States, I guess, right among liberal Zionist. But then, at the same time, this guy GaNS, if it had been him is probably not as capable at politics on the international level of that kind of thing. And yet, at the same time, is not the kind of lightning rod that Netanyahu is. And so maybe he would have, you know, relieve some pressure on the Israeli government and would have been allowed to carry out Netanyahu was Same policy with less pressure against it.

Mitchell Plitnick 19:07
Well, guns, I mean, right now the primary the primary concern for the Palestinians, given that Trump has basically taken everything away from them, the the thing that is most immediately worrisome is that Israel will annex large chunks of the West Bank, and and would probably, at this point do so in accordance with Trump’s deal of the century plan, which would put, you know, almost, you know, all of the significant areas of the West Bank under Israeli control and would leave Palestinian towns and cities as islands in an ocean of Israel, essentially on the West Bank. That is something that this agreement really paves the way for him. God does not oppose the annexation. All he wants to do is slow it down so that it doesn’t you know, create a massive backlash against ninja and I think it his view also on Your mind hopes for better cooperation with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. That’s God. So God and Gods basically was on the same page as Trump, or at least the Trump administration. In doing that. That’s why part of their agreement is that this emergency government that he and Netanyahu has now formed, can’t really do anything for the first six months with the one exception of annexation. They can annex large chunks of the West Bank and dances stances that they need to do this in coordination with the United States. And as he put it, the international community and the Palestinians, which is nonsense, because the international community will object to any annexation. And obviously, the Palestinians are not going to work with Israel on how to annex the West Bank to Israel. So what it really means is that they that that they will cooperate with the Trump administration to do it. And I think that that suits Netanyahu find the reason he had a problem. That was because of his right flank. But with with this agreement, Netanyahu had the freedom to freeze out the Amina party that I mentioned before, which is the far right party, representing not only settlers, but but it’s that sort of the settlers sort of point of view on these issues. And with them outside the coalition, the the pressure on Netanyahu is lessened. And he can much more easily make the case of Hey, look, you know, the Trump administration is gonna let us do this. We just have to do it, you know, a little bit more carefully than we otherwise might have. And I think that’ll sell to a lot of his right wing supporters. And for Trump, he, you know, his whole reelection strategy is the same as his election strategy was four years ago, which is feed the base, and the way you feed the base on this issue is by annexation. So Trump wants to now know Trump also has a relationship with Saudi Arabia, so this is a concern that he so he wants to make sure that they that Israel can annex according to the Trump plan without basically upsetting Saudi Arabia. And there’s now a timetable. starting July 1, the Israeli government can agree to annexation. Trump will want to do it somewhere between July 1 and election day. So we know that’s going to happen. We know Israel will want to do that because Joe Biden opposes annexation and should Trump lose that that whole plan is then off the table. So all of this is happening. You might have noticed in my description, all this is happening completely outside of the Palestinians control outside of their influence at all. Basically, Trump laid down His plan and said, if you if the Palestinians want to go along with this and want to talk with us about it, that’s fine. But that’s what they’re gonna need to do. They’re going to need to come to us and say, you know, we want To discuss this and figure out how to basically how to implement your wonderful deal of the century, Palestinians are obviously not going to do that. And so Mike Pompeo just just this week, made it very clear that annexation is Israel’s decision. That is what he said right now. So US policy is now that Israel can annex whatever it wants. in coordinating, he said, we’ll discuss it with them. And, you know, he’s clearly sent the message, you know, you do this in coordination with us. But Palestinians essentially have nothing to say about it. That’s US policy now.

Scott Horton 23:36
And just to make it clear, for people who aren’t all the way caught up on this, by annexation, this doesn’t mean all of the West Bank but it means what some huge percentage of the settlements that are already there as well as the entire Jordan River Valley and what what are the Palestinian have left?

Mitchell Plitnick 23:54
Essentially what the Trump plan envisions is that Israel will Next, pretty much all of the West Bank except for Palestinian towns and villages, and then they will Yeah, there will be small strips of land that would be used for roads to connect those towns and villages. And Israel will also compensate with some areas near the Gaza Strip. And essentially, what it does is creates is complete Israeli control over the West Bank without actually having to admit the Palestinians living there as citizens. So they have some sort of some sort of technical autonomy within their own towns, but no, you know, but the but the region as a whole is completely controlled by Israel. So, you know,

Scott Horton 24:46
it’s really the inverse of what I just said, rather than annexing the settlements and the roads between them. It’s annexing everything and just leaving the Palestinian towns as though they are the settlements with the roads between them.

Exactly. And and Actually, that’s a good way of putting it because that’s the way many, you know that that’s the reality that many people now perceive they perceive the Palestinians as settling in Israel. So Israel has managed through this project over these decades to completely reverse reality. And and give the impression that somehow Palestinians are interloping on Israeli land, which is, of course, the reverse of, of the truth. And the, the process by which they’re doing this is a is at the same time a political one, but also a practical one. So in reality, Israel already controls all of that those areas. And it’s simply a question of the acknowledgement of that and and taking the idea of any pressure to make changes off the table. And that’s what the US is pushing for. And, you know, Europe is doing very, very little other than collecting its tongue. The United Nations is pretty much powerless with given the US veto at the secret Anyhow, so, and the Palestinians right now are looking for help from wherever they can get it. And frankly, in the United States, we’re a little busy with the Coronavirus. So it’s very unlikely that we’re going to see any serious pressure for to stop this this momentum anytime soon.

Well, and when you mentioned that Biden is for the two state solution, I mean, so as the Center for American Progress doesn’t mean anything.

Mitchell Plitnick 26:26
Right. It means I mean, it means that he was opposed to this step. He’s opposed to formally annexing the West Bank. And that isn’t nothing. It is important if the if Israel does annex all of its settlements and Area C and, you know, the Jordan Valley that all of these areas if Israel does do that, yeah, there will be all sorts of protests and yelling, screaming, but 10 years from now, that’s going to be the new normal. It will be it will be something that everyone simply accepts as the way it is just as we now Except that Israel has settlements that, you know, the major settlement blocks will be part of Israel. Everyone just accepts that even though there’s no real basis for that. And certainly Palestinians haven’t agreed to that. So it is important that this be that this be averted, it’s not impossible that it can be if it can be delayed until Biden gets in because Biden will object to it. It’s not, you know, Biden, I don’t think anyone confused Biden was a great friend of the Palestinians. But at the same time, the difference between him and Trump is still enormous. And taking this step would make a difference.

Scott Horton 27:36
Yeah, I mean, I wonder about that. It seems like the kind of steps that he wouldn’t have taken if he’d been sworn in three and a half years ago. And yet, his support for a Palestinian state is always just not in the real sense, but just in the BS sense that Yeah, we’re gonna kick this can down the road and let more and more facts be created on the ground. You can go ahead and annex at the end of my eight years instead of the beginning.

Mitchell Plitnick 27:57
I think there’s a bit of that. I do. Think that he is pretty much in line with groups like the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Groups like that, you know, who certainly see this as as pushing a quote unquote, two state solution that really favors Israel that, you know, includes a demilitarized Palestinian state that’s completely dependent on Israel. So, you know, that’s true. At the same time, I think more progressive forces have a way of at least trying to steer that conversation. If that’s where it is, we leave if if we move to annexation, there’s almost nothing for you know, that that groups like j street groups like the US campaign for Palestinian rights groups like Jewish voice for peace, the American friends Services Committee, these groups that that really try and, you know, defend actual Palestinian rights and try to come up with a truly just solution to this that that works for everyone. there if annexation moves forward. The road to any kind of progress in that vein, I think is very, very, might be closed off completely and certainly becomes very, very narrow.

Scott Horton 29:10
Well, so what about the kind of strange counterfactual here that actually Netanyahu is committing suicide for the Jewish state. And because he’s so good at politics, he’s so stupid about the reality of the situation. He’s trying to create, not just a de facto, but a jury apartheid state there in a way that maybe the planet Earth has let them get away with so far, while pretending that someday there’s going to be a Palestinian state, where now they’re virtually announcing that half the population of Israel will never be represented, they’ll never have any civil rights to participate in the government. And they’ll never have any, you know, actual civil liberties protections the way Israeli citizens do in their courts or from the shin bed or the IDF and essentially just half the population or A substantial part of the population of Israel is not free and will not be free because they’re not Jewish. Simple as that, and that from the river to the sea, and that that is untenable, even though, you know, that kind of half solution of Oh, yeah, yeah, we’re going to give you a Palestinian state someday, which will never come they were getting away with that. And maybe they won’t be able to get away with this. What do you think?

Mitchell Plitnick 31:09
Well, I mean, that’s possible, it remains to be seen. I certainly that’s the argument, that, that this precludes the idea, and it clearly precludes the precludes any notion of a Jewish and democratic state. Some would argue that those two things can’t go together anyway. But whether they can or not, certainly the course that Israel’s on now precludes any real meaning of democracy in any serious sense. Now, is it tenable? I mean, you know, who knows, Israel has Things me probably one of the things about this particular moment is we’ve seen that things are terrible that we constantly said, we’re not. You know, the move of the US embassy to Jerusalem was supposed to set off a massive conflagration crash in the Middle East. It didn’t. Something I warned people about saying at the time, it said, You keep saying this is what’s going to happen. If it doesn’t happen, and it’s very likely that it won’t. What people are going to realize is that a lot of these arguments are just not very valid, and they can go ahead without fear very many consequences. So far, no one has stopped Israel from these things. Israel defeat this sort of argument that you just made, and the fear of it is what has stopped Israel itself. But the more that Netanyahu pushes the envelope, the more people realize that you know, life goes on, no matter what Israel does, no matter how much they deny Palestinians their rights, no matter how deeply entrenched, they they make the occupation. So until something actually turns them back. I I’m not, you know, I’m not certainly going to bet on the idea that that these that blatant apartheid in this way, you know, taking the mask off is something that the world isn’t prepared to tolerate. so far. Nothing, you know, nothing has been too far.

Scott Horton 32:50
Yeah. All right. So let me ask you this, and it’s all hypothetical future oriented stuff, but and, you know, my Palestinian friends that I interview on the show, they hate this idea. Ali Abu Nima and Ramsay baru, they’re both one state guys, but they want a brand new state. And my idea is that all the Palestinians, and there’s so much, you know, non violent protests, civil disobedience type protests that goes on not that they get any media coverage most of the time anyway, but there’s so much kind of peaceful protesting on the part of the Palestinians anyway, that my idea is that all demand Israeli citizenship, they ought to go ahead and admit that Israel annex The West Bank and the Gaza Strip back in 1967. And they just been pretending that they haven’t this whole time. That’s exactly what they did. And one state for one people call it Israel. And if you want to rename it is really Stein later or whatever, after the big fight in the Knesset fine, but just they should demand citizenship, like the one fifth of the population of Israel or less now, I guess, of the Muslims and Christian Arab citizens of Israel, or Palestinian citizens of Israel, as they’re called and and join with them, then, you know, it’ll be the end of the pretense of some sort of independent state or some sort of limited autonomy under the PA or any of this kind of thing. And then that way, all of the kind of, you know, the wall has been pulled over everybody’s eyes will be completely cleared out of the way and it’ll be a much simpler argument to take on as the Israelis have to figure out a way to deny citizenship to them. Millions of people who live under their control in a way that right now, the argument is just too diffused, I guess between one state that looks like this or two states that look like that, and things like that. But so what do you think would be the reaction insight is or like, wouldn’t that put their back up against the wall where they really have no choice now? They’re going to annex the land, they’ve got to annex the people to?

Mitchell Plitnick 35:24
I think there are certainly people who are very afraid of that. I mean, that’s at this point. But that’s where most of the support for the two state solution comes from. Is that very argument? I, I also, I mean, I’m aware of number of Palestinian friends of mine and believing activists who think that’s exactly where things are going and that that’s where things should go that this is not an issue of one state or two states or any of that it’s an issue of rights, and that Palestinians demanding their rights is the is the way to go is and that Israel has really left. Left power Indians no option. I tend to agree with that. I think that, that that’s exactly the argument that should be made that this is a question of rights. That and that you can bring Palestinians into existing structures in Israel. I mean, I do think that creates a completely different country. You know, as I characterize Israel before, as an ethnic cracy, it wouldn’t be that anymore would actually be a democracy. And that would be a country that looks completely different from what Israel is now, although it would still have a lot of its Jewish sort of spirit. Hebrew language and and, you know, obviously would have the greatest, you know, the highest percentage of Jewish population in the world. But that is exactly the direction that it’s going in, and it would remove I think, you know, I’ve said for, you know, decades now, that the entire argument about one state or two state is irrelevant. It is we’re, we’re, we’re nowhere near there. And the question of structures is something that we can decide when We decide that everybody’s rights are first going to be knowledge respected and and given legal protection. We don’t have that until we have that there’s no resolve in this conflict. And I, I believe that 20 years ago, I believe it now. So yeah, I agree with that concept. I think a lot of Palestinians are agree with that concept. I think more and more of the Israeli left is recognizing that that’s the only possible feature. That that doesn’t include, you know, literally denying millions of people their rights. So, yeah, I think that and i and i do think it’s more than just a theoretical question. I think it is a question of how do we discuss the issues now, I know that for me personally, as somebody who is neither Israeli or Palestinian, but as as an American Jew, who’s somebody who’s very, you know, obviously concerned and and involved with this issue. That’s the way I try to pray me there’s a question of rights and I don’t really care how rights are recognized as long as as long as everyone’s rights are fully recognized equally. That should be the framework. It’s a framework that I think Americans can understand an awful lot better than the question of what is to state. What is the two state solution mean? And how does that square with historically justices and etc, it just gets so complicated? Whereas equal rights is a very simple is a very simple concept and one that that Americans believe in very strongly,

Scott Horton 37:28
you know, all right, you guys. Well, that is Michel plitt Nick, and he is the president of rethinking foreign policy. That’s it rethinking foreign policy.org and here he’s got this great piece at the Quincy Institute for Responsible statecraft, otherwise known as the low blog. Israel’s unity government protects Netanyahu from prosecution paves the way for annexation. Thanks very much. Appreciate it.

Mitchell Plitnick 37:53
Glad to be here anytime.

Scott Horton 37:57
All right, That’s it for anti war radio for this Morning. I’m your host, Scott Horton, 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

Scott Horton 0:10
All right, y’all welcome it’s Scott Horton Show. I am the director of the Libertarian Institute editorial director of antiwar.com, author of the book Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. And I’ve recorded more than 5000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at ScottHorton.org. You can also sign up to the podcast feed. The full archive is also available at youtube.com/ScottHortonShow. All right, you guys on the line. I’ve got the great Grant F. Smith. He is the founder and director of the Institute for Research, Middle Eastern policy, that’s IR map, IR MEP, ir mip.org. And he wrote a bunch of great books, including big Israel and the latest, the Israel lobby. enters state government, Rise of the Virginia Israel advisory board. Welcome back to the show, Grant. How you doing?

Grant F. Smith 1:08
Hey, I’m doing well. Scott, thanks for having me on. Again.

Scott Horton 1:10
Very happy to have you here. Let’s talk about this new piece@antiwar.com. IRS must describe its search for Israeli settlement policies. Yeah. So it turns out that people can donate to Israeli racial colonies on the West Bank, and write it off on their taxes, just like when they donate to the Israeli Defense Forces, is that correct?

Grant F. Smith 1:38
That is correct, creates a huge tax gap. And as I argue there’s really no demonstrated social welfare benefit to it. That’s why you’re supposed to be able to get tax exemptions is there supposed to be some offsetting activity that relieves the US government of a burden, but there’s no evidence of that. And again, It’s worse than in the case of the settlements where you’ve just got active displacement, which seems to fit the exact letter of the neutrality act of 1794 that US citizens aren’t allowed to kind of declare a slow motion war against any group overseas. That’s Congress’s job to declare those slow motion laws against people overseas. So it’s, it’s an interesting question.

Scott Horton 2:28
Yeah. And now, so if I wanted to donate to say the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to help with their occupation of Tibet, could I write that off on my taxes?

Grant F. Smith 2:39
Well, it kind of depends on whether you were part of a well organized and franchise group of people who were somewhat in line with one or other party. If that were the case. You can probably do that, but I don’t think that Would it be possible in the case of Tibet, I don’t think anyone right now would particularly care about that if you were doing it for Taiwan, you’d probably get away with it. If you’re doing it for Gambia trying to ship them some arms, maybe now you’d be prosecuted. And in fact, Eric Holder prosecuted a case like that in 2015, against a couple of Americans. So the the rule here just like in a lot of other laws that are never enforced against the people doing the most damage, such as the foreign agents Registration Act, the rule is that if you’re small, disenfranchised, and not doing something at all in line with one or the other established parties, he probably could get into trouble. So I would say that’s a definite No, no. What you just propose Scott?

Scott Horton 3:51
Hmm. Okay. Well, it’s not that I was trying to but just hypothetically speaking, and I was wondering about the quote unquote, rule of law. And what it’s supposed to say about things like that.

Grant F. Smith 4:04
Right? Well, the whole the whole exercise here, though, with this Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that we filed against the IRS last year, was to flush out some policy from them, because it’s been obvious to me for 20 years that they have a policy and the policy is not to have a policy so that it can continue. So if you kind of corner an IRS commissioner, like I did with Douglas Shulman, a number of years back, if he talks to the tax payer advocate, Nina Olson and corner her she’ll also just bluster and edge around the issue. So, you know, what’s, what’s become obvious is that this is another place in The United States where there are huge stakes involved, and that government agencies, which are supposed to be following rule of law, are instead being ambiguous and avoiding any sort of action that they would surely pursue. In other cases, so the lawsuit was all about getting the IRS to release its internal policies on what amount to multiple billions of dollars that flow overseas and charitable tax exempt contributions every year, some of which are going to settlements A number of years ago, USA Today or USA Today implied that it was $50 billion had been invested in settlements, likely from the US

Scott Horton 5:48
over one time.

Grant F. Smith 5:49
Well, that was over decades. But the question is, well, okay, Mr. IRS commissioner, please tell us Exactly. So I can be sure that if I want to, you know, fund settlers and erielle, or I want to fund settlers who are pushing people out and burning olive groves over here, I just want you to assure me that that is tax exempt social welfare activity, and I want you to put it in writing. And they won’t do it. They allow it to continue. They’ve been sued at least once recently by Susan Apple Hauer on that very issue. And the appeals court where it was appealed, just didn’t get into that particular subject. They acknowledge there was harm going on. But they just wouldn’t say that the litigants had any rights to even be in court trying to obtain some relief from this massive tidal wave of cash. It’s causing so much damage to people who really do have sort of native indigenous ties to the land? So the purpose of the lawsuit was to try to get a judge to force the IRS to come clean on the issue. And the whole reason for writing an article is that the judge this week actually stood up on his, you know, his bench from wherever he’s working and told the IRS look, we’re not just going to fast track this feuless suit toward dismissal. I think all of the documents that have been filed so far and people can read those court documents, going to ir mep.org. And looking at foil lawsuits have indicated that they’ve been extremely disingenuous at the IRS about trying to respond to Treasury and State Department Request for Information about why they’re still allowing tax exempt status to remain in some of these organizations that are blatantly engaged in warlike activities. And the IRS won’t ever clearly respond even to other government agencies. And so, you know, it’s it’s just a, it’s such a, it’s become such a mess at this point that it’s clear that there is an operating policy. And I raised the question with the judge directly. I said, Look, we spent years litigating for clarity on why the arms Export Control Act isn’t enforced. Which bars any foreign aid to foreign nuclear powers that aren’t a members of the NPT, it looks like there must be another gag order. in place, such as there is in the nuclear weapons slash foreign aid issue at the IRS. So we want to see that gag order, there’s obviously something there that has meant immunized this five to $6 billion per year, from any sort of scrutiny and any sort of action on tax exempt status. And I think the judge agrees, if you look at the body of evidence there is there has to be a policy. So he did not allow the Department of Justice in this case to make claims of, Oh, we’ve got a pandemic. You know, our lawyers are being taken away from working on all sorts of pandemic related legal work. And we got to get them off this frivolous lawsuit, and he said, Now, why don’t you since you’re claiming that there isn’t the policy or nothing released, so Why don’t you clearly outline exactly where you looked. And so now that’s what they’ll be doing between now and June, they’re going to be trying to tell a judge where they looked, and why they couldn’t find anything after so many years of litigation, so many years of news articles, you know, even j Street, which is, I would say not so great on a lot of issues, as at least pointed out, that this is a serious issue. We included that in the lawsuit exhibits. You know, why isn’t a clear directive or a clear set of policies being issued, which, you know, obviously have been in place for years and years.

Scott Horton 10:47
Hold on just one second, be right back. So you’re constantly buying things from Amazon calm. Well, that makes sense. They bring it right to your house. So what you do though, is click through from the link in the right hand margin at Scott Horton. org. And I’ll get a Little bit of a kickback from Amazon’s into the sale won’t cost you a thing. Nice little way to help support the show. Again, that’s right there in the margin at Scott Horton. org. Hey, I’ll check it out the libertarian Institute. That’s me and my friends have published three great books this year. First is no quarter, the ravings of William Norman Greg. He was the best one of us. Now he’s gone. But this great collection is a truly fitting legacy for his fight for freedom. I know you’ll love it. And there’s coming to Palestine by the great Sheldon Richmond. It’s a collection of 40 important essays. He’s written over the years about the truth behind the Israel Palestine conflict. You’ll learn so much and highly valued this definitive libertarian take on the dispossession of the Palestinians and the reality of their brutal occupation. And last but not least, is the great Ron Paul. The Scott Horton show, interviews 2004 through 2019 interview transcripts of all of my interviews of the good doctor over the years on all The wars, money taxes the police state and more. So how do you like that? Pretty good, right? Find them all at libertarian institute.org slash books. You need stickers for your band your business will Rick and the guys over at the bumper sticker calm. We’ve got you covered great work great prices, sticky things with things printed on them. Whenever you need the bumper sticker calm, we’ll get it done right for you. The bumper sticker.com. Well now so is there what exactly is the law say? I mean, other than the neutrality act when it comes to, you know, IRS legislation, or is there anything or it would only be rules and regulations written by the IRS themselves?

Grant F. Smith 12:44
Well, you know, the IRS has done some terrible things. You know, what the law says is that any organization that has gotten IRS tax exempt status should be again, relieving US government burden and be engaged in some social welfare benefit. But what the IRS has done instead is allow a whole giant ecosystem of Americans for Israel organizations to sprout up in this country, which raise and just funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to counterpart organizations in Israel, whether it’s for the defense forces, like you say, or for the Weizmann Institute, to develop nuclear weapons technology. And the IRS has delegated all oversight responsibility to the mainly New York offices of these organizations. And there is no oversight. And so that’s something I detailed in the book, big Israel, the entire evolution of tax policy to even allow for organizations to be doing this sort of foreign counterpart, fundraising, and then the fact that they just happened to me gauged and self regulation were less one of the one of the charities sort of outs itself, there’s never going to be any oversight. They don’t really have any idea where the money’s going. And it’s only gotten worse. In the 2008 revamp of tax reporting for charities, which is public, you have to actually publish your IRS Form 990. They allowed an argument to be made that actually we don’t want to give any of the names of the foreign counterparts or exact destinations anymore because it could present a security risk. So this is a black hole at this point into which billions of dollars flow and then Americans basically have to make up because of the huge tax cap that it creates. So not only is it creating a huge tax gap, in that all these deductions are taken on the money donated but then it comes back and bites us. I mean, as you’ve repeated heatedly gone over on your show. When the 911 hijackers were plotting against the US one of the major points of contention with US policy was this horrible ongoing treatment and ethnic cleansing going on. So we’re basically allowing a constellation of Israel affinity organizations to keep that fire stoked. And there seem to be all sorts of laws on the book, including the ancient neutrality Act, which would forbid that sort of activity from going on, but the IRS Treasury all asleep at the switch won’t respond. You know, take a front to being challenged on this stuff,

Scott Horton 15:42
huh? Well, now, so the judge has ruled, I guess, you know, in a in a hearing here that in your favor and in your maps favor and saying the IRS now has to go back and come up with any pertinent regulations and cough them up to you into the court. Is that right?

Grant F. Smith 16:02
Yeah, there’s this thing called avant index in which you know, for, for this foi a game, what agencies typically do is they narrowly define what constitutes responsiveness to your request. They conduct extremely circumscribed searches for that information, and then they come back and they say, Yep, we couldn’t find anything. So, you know, what we’re going to see in June because this judge demanded it because I think he saw the hypocrisy of this, oh, we can’t find any policy when there clearly isn’t policy. He just said no, why don’t you send a detailed description of where you looked and anything you passed over? And so that’s called avant index. We’ve used it before with requests against the State Department against the Department of Energy, and it’s an effective tool. I mean, FOIA in general has been so gutted by precedents which are overly different The federal agency claims of secrecy and little, you know, damage harm national security. If we say anything about that topic, that it’s just become very difficult to get anything these days at the FBI, you can get mainly pro forma responses saying, you know, we’re not, if there were information like that the so called glow my response, we wouldn’t be able to even discuss whether it exists or not that sort of response has been growing. And there’s no evidence the IRS has even looked for any information. So what the judge has said is, before we rush for the exits here, on the basis of Justice Department boilerplate, you got to prove you actually looked for something. And the lawsuit itself is full of evidence that all sorts of information exists. All sorts of views are held, all sorts of internal pressure has been generated to come up with a policy that if they come back again, And they just say, Actually, there really isn’t anything here. I think it’s gonna perhaps not fly with this particular judge. Now, another thing I did mention in the article is we’ve had a terrible judge on some of our other cases, which were effectively captured by that judge, who in one single year dismissed three different cases. And in one instance, didn’t even justify why so that we couldn’t effectively appeal. So it’s as though you know, someone with a rubber stamp has, you know, been working away hard inside the DC circuit, but this guy this contrary, this seems to be cut from a different bolt of cloth.

Scott Horton 18:49
Yeah, well, that’s good. At least. That doesn’t usually happen. But occasionally you get a judge who recognizes that. Hey, I got a lifetime appointment here. really long with anybody, Jesse trying to do got a great judge out there in Utah? There’s a couple like that. But

Grant F. Smith 19:08
yeah, I think usually I think, you know, you’re supposed to believe that. Well, I mean, nobody does anymore, but that all judges are sort of, you know, starry decisis following precedent, you know, just look at the truth. And that’s, of course, it’s not true. Anyone who’s gone to jury duty and been admonished that they’re participating in any sort of fair and transparent system. I mean, these days has to frankly laugh, given what’s been going on for so many decades. But, yeah, so a judge, you know, this doesn’t mean we won the case. It’s right. I guess the thing that makes it unique is that we haven’t lost quickly and that a judge is actually being responsive and taking interest in the topic at hand. So we’ll see

Scott Horton 20:00
what happens after the IRS comes back and says, well, geez, we tried judge and couldn’t find nothing. So don’t make us look again.

Grant F. Smith 20:07
And maybe a leaker will put some stuff out becoming aware of this and say, Yeah, no, actually, we do all sorts of terrible things here, some of them. And, you know, the last thing the IRS should be doing is telling the State Department or the Treasury Department, employees who phoned them from Jerusalem saying, you know, we have all these settlements sprouting up and all these warlike activities happening. So what is it about these organizations that merits they’re having IRS tax exempt status? Shouldn’t you be revoking that? And the IRS said well call our call our hotline? What this is an agency that agency referral, you know, it’s just, and Douglas Shulman again, his response, his specious response, his evasive response to being called out on national Public Radio saying, what are you going to do about settlement financing? What’s your policy? It got to the extent that other callers were phoning into the show saying you didn’t answer the question, what’s You know? And Susan page of USA Today who’s still around was also on Schulman saying, what is the policy? You’re here to explain policy and all he would do is shuffle around saying, how the IRS reaches deep into organizations and looks at what they’re actually doing and blah, blah, blah. None of it’s true. It’s, uh, you know, it’s I think it’s one of the biggest frauds right now at the IRS. Yeah.

Scott Horton 21:37
Well, I wouldn’t doubt if they, if they do a deep dive on your map and the libertarian Institute. Same thing is,

Grant F. Smith 21:46
yeah, no, they should. Yeah, definitely expend hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars looking looking at that. I think. I think that would be so stupid. It could almost happen. Yeah.

Scott Horton 21:58
All right. Well, So, how long do they have before they have to respond to this?

Grant F. Smith 22:04
Yeah, they’ve got till June. And, again, they’re gonna have to be detailed in their response to the court, they’re gonna have to say, look, you know, and if they have major omissions, like if they didn’t look in the office of the commissioner, where this sort of policy would have been set, then they didn’t really respond to the FOIA. And we’ve had this time after time where, you know, no, Freedom of Information Act response even really starts until you’ve sued somebody and then typically they can delay for up to a year, while all sorts of perfunctory motions are filed, but now, I think, an effort that began for us in 2005, under this particular case, in spring of last year, as far as this particular foil, it’s gonna start, that’s my My impression, because I frankly don’t think they looked for anything. That would be standard operating procedure agency does not bother looking until a judge says Why don’t you start looking? Yeah, no.

Scott Horton 23:13
All right. So before I let you go here, can you give us any updates on the aftermath of the publication of your last book in the Israel lobby enters state government? I mean, talk about scandalous this whole thing with vibe here, what’s been the reaction so far?

Grant F. Smith 24:22
Well, any Virginian who picks up a copy is stunned. I mean, really, because I think the thing that knocks them over is really the fact that Virginia companies are being targeted, essentially, that be replaced by Israeli companies, whether from the fish farming industry or defense contractors and food processors, so they don’t like it. But, you know, as far as the legislature, the book was carried up to the legislature and delivered to a lot of a lot of legislators on lobbying day by a local organization. And they’ve all made arguments. But what’s happening? You know, the inside view is that, well, this is Israel we’re talking about so we can’t really make any headway waves. It doesn’t really matter how much corruption you’ve documented through Freedom of Information acts under the state sunshine laws. We can’t really go after these guys. So there’s a there are a couple of initiatives to get more traction against via web. And I don’t think via has gotten any good press since it came out. But the problem is the Richmond times dispatch at some of the hardcore investigative journalists, they’re just not picking up and running with it. They want to talk about Second Amendment activity, they want to talk about COVID-19 response. This is not a winner for them. So I think it’s growing and the informations out there, and people are starting to trade it and pass it around more. And there’s a lot of interest in holding the organization accountable. So I think it’s had a good impact, but a lot more remains to be done.

Scott Horton 25:28
Yeah, well, best of luck with that. I mean, again, for anybody in Virginia, especially but for all Americans, you really should take a look at this book and it is amazing. You check out my last interview with grant all about her two interviews ago, maybe the Israel lobby interstate government, and it is hair raising and mind blowing. It’s really something else to see the level of, what do you call it? chutzpah that the Israeli government brings into well into service of their interests. Inside the United States, there are short term interests at the expense of their long term ones if he asked me, but I guess I don’t know yet.

Grant F. Smith 26:07
Yeah. Well, the big the big story right now is energetics and Israeli company that has built wind turbines on the occupied Golan Heights. It’s taken Palestinian land to build solar arrays in the West Bank. It’s been listed, as you know, violating all sorts of human rights by various organizations. And it’s trying to build 11 utility scale wind farms across the state right now. And it’s just, you know, they’re trying to pull those Full speed ahead without answering any questions about their illicit activities overseas. And again, it raises another question so Okay, so you raise money with here, Chesapeake, or your Greenville your other solar farms and send it back to Tel Aviv so they can expand again. In this expedition against a friendly nation, whether it’s Syria or the Palestinians, where’s the neutrality act on that? So I think they’re gonna face some big problems as they continue to try to roll out across the states and take some of that solar business away from us and Virginia companies that would rather have those opportunities. So we’ll see, people are starting to get noticed.

Scott Horton 27:23
Yeah, well, and they should take notice. And especially here’s where the rubber meets the road, right. If you’re a solar power company, you might not have an ideology at all, but just notice that you’re being robbed, and forced to pay at gunpoint being forced by your government to pay for your competition.

Grant F. Smith 27:43
Exactly. And in this case, that a city council will prefer this connected foreign entity, which claims to be Virginia and only because it’s set up a bunch of front companies, prefer them accelerate their conditional use permits exempting them from rural zoning laws and Giving them construction permits, they will fast track those guys. Even as your application sits at the bottom of a cardboard box. Is that the way you want it to work in your state? That’s a question that’s being raised in that industry.

Scott Horton 28:12
Yeah, absolutely. And again, everybody, you got to read this book, The Israel lobby enters state government and the rest of them to that guy’s got like 10 books, I don’t know. 810 books about the Israel lobby, and their legal and illegal influence operations in this country.

Grant F. Smith 28:28
Trying to keep ahead of your publication count. I don’t know they’re comin

Scott Horton 28:32
up fast. Well, you know what my next book is going to be like 10 books in one. So we’ll be neck and neck at that point

Grant F. Smith 28:38
I think. I don’t know if I’m gonna let you count in that way. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. All right,

Scott Horton 28:46
an. Well, listen, I don’t know what we do without you, Grant. It’s such great work. such important work as always, so thank you.

Grant F. Smith 28:52
All right. Thanks for having me on

Scott Horton 28:53
All right, you guys the great grant f Smith. He’s at IR map, IR MEP, the Institute for Research Middle Eastern policy ear map.org. And here’s this latest piece at antiwar.com IRS must describe its search for Israeli settlement policies. And again the book is the Israel lobby enters state government Rise of the Virginia Israel advisory board. The Scott Horton show, Antiwar Radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com antiwar.com ScottHorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org

Scott Horton 0:10
All right, y’all welcome it’s Scott Horton Show. I am the director of the Libertarian Institute editorial director of antiwar.com, author of the book Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. And I’ve recorded more than 5000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at ScottHorton.org. You can also sign up to the podcast feed. The full archive is also available at youtube.com/ScottHortonShow. All right, you guys on the line. I’ve got the great Jim Bovard, author of public policy hooligan and attention deficit democracy in a bunch of great books like that. And he is writing at the American Conservative magazine. Duncan lambs parents threatened with jail for protesting his killing the third In a series over there, welcome back to the show. How you doing, Jim?

Jim Bovard 1:03
Hey Scott, thanks for having me back.

Scott Horton 1:05
Really happy to have you on the show here. And people should know that. The first one here at TAC is called didn’t Maryland police shoot and kill a sleeping man, followed by the mystery deepens over the pre dawn police killing of Duncan limp and then now the latest hear about his parents being threatened with jail for protesting the killing. But if you could for people not familiar, can we go back to the night of was it March 12th. And the raid on this guy’s house?

Jim Bovard 1:38
Yeah, it was. It was the morning of March 12 at 4:30am and Duncan lab was living in with his family in a very affluent part of montgomery county in Potomac quiet neighborhood. the montgomery county police said they had got an anonymous tip two months earlier that he had a a firearm and he was, according to that place he’s prohibited from having firearms due to a juvenile conviction. The family’s lawyers say that’s not true. But the cops went and built a case up, I guess over the next two months. My impression is that there was an informant who was key to the case. And the cops went to a judge on March 11, got a no knock search warrant and then basically went and attack the house the next morning it started out, according to the family by the police shooting into limps bedroom window, and he was apparently fatally wounded in bed and then the police through flashbangs and then stormed into the house. They basically drag folks around they handcuffed the family members and his pregnant girlfriend who was in bed with him, and so they were all handcuffed and being harangue by the cops while he was bleeding to death.

Scott Horton 3:02
man. So I know it’s too early to say for sure. But does it look like they just went there with the intent to murder him or one of these cops is just, you know, goofing around with his finger on the trigger and premature ejaculate it all over the place here. What happened?

Jim Bovard 3:18
Well, you know, that’s a good question because there are some folks who, who think that the that the place intended to kill him all along. And if you start out the start out of search, by firing into the bedroom window, as the family says it started, that does seem more like an execution in a search. But, you know, I don’t know what what the intent was, but montgomery county did turn a search warrant into a death warrant. And, you know, there are some folks who said, Well, I was this just as a single SWAT, you know, team member who was jumpy or shouldn’t be hard, whatever. If that was true, then why is the county basically covering it up Lately, and the the county’s put out three different versions of why why limp was killed and the third one really was almost comically in bad grammar as far as twisting and turning sentences and you can read it three times and you don’t and it doesn’t mention that oh by the way, we shot this dude and he died It was more like well he was there and there was a rifle in the bedroom and then there was a shotgun shell and the door is like you know, okay so when did you kill him? You know this is this is someone to remain I mean they the cops made a big deal out of a plate putting online photos of five guns that they seize at limbs house, but they haven’t put out any photos of his bullet written corpse which I think might people might be interested in.

Scott Horton 4:46
Yeah, well, and you would think that if there was a gun near the outstretched right hand of his bullet written corpse they just showed us that

Jim Bovard 4:54
yeah, I mean, the the cops have said there was a rifle. They’ve kind of implied you You know, again, it’s very strange wording how they did it, and they’re a third version of the fatal raid. But you would think that they, you know, you would think that that lamp was on the property line waiting to start shooting at them as soon as they pulled up in the driveway at 4:30am. So, but no, I mean, apparently how this went down as a cops fired in the window. There were four different windows on Duncan lamps, bedroom, and the cops may have known which one to shoot through, I don’t know, or I don’t know what kind of, you know, lighting they had, what kind of night vision material they might have had night vision equipment. So, but the cops have said almost nothing for over a month. And their story doesn’t pass the smell test. And they’re, you know, montgomery county police say well, they’re so overwhelmed with the pandemic of They can’t really respond to requests on this. You know, however, three days ago, the county police posted a video online there were 30 police cars who did a parade by a local hospital to show that they were supporting the healthcare workers. Okay, if y’all got time for a parade, you got time to answer some questions about how you killed a County resident, and apparently completely unjustified raid at 4:30am. I mean, okay, if the cops want to search this guy’s house, knock on the door at 9am say, Hey, here’s our warrant, you know, open up. This is this is how it’s done in civilized societies. This is how it was established in England, I think in 1603 or 1604. But the sheriff had to knock and announce and declare his intent and so a warrant. So we’re going back 400 years, but here we are in Maryland and 400 years we’ve gone the wrong direction.

Scott Horton 6:58
Yeah, man. Hey guys, Scott Horton here from my Swanson scrape book, The War state. It’s about the rise of the military industrial complex and the power elite after World War Two, during the administration’s of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and jack kennedy. It’s a very enlightening take on this definitive era on America’s road to world Empire. The war state by Mike Swanson, find it in the right hand margin at Scott horton.org. Hey, yo, Mike Swanson is a successful Wall Street trader with an Austrian School understanding of the markets and therefore he has great advice to share with you check out Mike’s work and sign up for his list at Wall Street window.com and that’s what you’ll get a window into all of Mike’s trades. He’ll explain what he’s buying and selling and expecting and why. I know you’ll learn and earn a lot. Wall Street window comm that’s Wall Street window.com. So now when it comes to this tip, informant? Well, I guess they claim they had gotten an anonymous tip, but you’re saying it sounds to you like they had an informant that turned the guy into them. We’re gonna get that from,

Jim Bovard 8:11
um, several different insights on that. Part of one of which is the there is a pattern in these kinds of cases. These, you know, the duck lamp was tied to a number of groups, I guess Boogaloo groups. He was helping them set up websites. He was helping folks. You know, he was he was outspoken online on this. And, you know, there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, you know, I’ve been a big supporter of gun rights for my entire adult life. But there are a lot of there have been a lot of cases in the past where people in some of these groups, we’re actually you know, basically double agents working for the government. There. A number of libertarians who have been taken down on this stuff. There was a group back in 1996. I believe that in Arizona that got basically leveled by a government foreman who encouraged him to do things that were not legal. And this is this is the same pattern you have with the anti war groups going back to the Vietnam War, the 1960s. yet you’ve seen this a lot with Muslims. After 911. A lot of government informants will go into a mosque and basically encourage people to well, you know, you know, let’s do this, or let’s make a pipe bomb, or let’s do that. So, you know, it’s, I don’t have specifics, and it’s possible, I’m wrong on this. But it’s striking to me that the SWAT team was so frightened of Duncan lab, that they felt they had to go and shooting. And this, you know, if something like half something like this happened in Baltimore, people will say, well, it was a Thursday. You know, this is very unused. And montgomery county, it’s and this is also a very unusual for the montgomery county police, which does not have a record of doing these kind of SWAT killings in affluent neighborhoods. Hmm.

Scott Horton 10:14
Well, and you know if they’re so concerned about that this guy was a member of some patriot groups are this and that kind of thing. It goes to show their ignorance, you know, I mean, the reality is these guys the Boogaloo or whatever, that’s not going to happen until they really try to go around confiscating guns, you know, and mass door to door with the National Guard, or the Army or some kind of thing where that day never comes. But these guys aren’t going to go out in a this guy lamp, for example, wasn’t going to go out in a hail of bullets in glory just because they came to his house with a warrant where he was assured that he would see a black robe judge and be arraigned and and go through the regular process. You don’t I mean, the

Jim Bovard 10:59
Yeah, but yeah.

Scott Horton 11:00
I can see them convincing themselves looking at his Facebook page if he was part of some, you know, had a Boogaloo meme up there something that Oh, no, it’s Randy Weaver we have to go, you know, which they built up Randy waiver that same way this guy’s Special Forces, so he’s gonna go all Rambo on us but it was all in their own imagination. Same thing kind of deal, right?

Jim Bovard 11:22
Yeah. And as far as I know, Duncan limp had no history of violence. He was not making threats. I mean, there are some of these Boogaloo type some of these folks, you know, some of the things that they say online is like, Whoa, you know, I’m, um, as someone who has dealt with a lot of federal agencies over the years and been very critical, they’ve had been criticized by them. It’s like, there’s, there’s a certain standard standard that you need to use if you’re speaking in public or online. And a lot of folks don’t seem to be aware of that. So

Scott Horton 11:56
you’re saying there’s no indication that this guy was threatening to kill anybody. No Civil War, maybe just show up for one laughter and start?

Jim Bovard 12:04
No, no but the, from what I’ve heard, from what I’ve seen, he was helping gun rights groups set up secure platforms on the internet. Dr. Lappe was very savvy software guy and he was a he was doing pro bono work for some of the gun rights and hardline groups that may have put him more in the crosshairs as far as concern, but that still wouldn’t explain why the SWAT team felt like they had to go in at 4:30am in the morning and perhaps start out by shooting and then throwing in flashbangs. There’s a search warrant that the the police had sealed for 30 days it should have been opened, I guess a week or so 10 days ago, but the courts are closed down here because of the pandemic. However, the the you know they have time for please raise But not bad. But the lawyers. The the lent family has two excellent lawyers, Randy Sandler and Jonathan Felder. They are pushing to get that those warrants and the affidavits publicly released or at least released to the family and the lawyers. And in maybe in the affidavits that we’ll be able to see what the police were told, or at least we’ll see what the police told the judge. I would think that the judge, the judge who signed off on a no knock warrant, at 4:30am in the morning for someone who did not have a history of violence, you know, people need to answer some questions on this.

Scott Horton 13:39
Yeah. Well, I mean, they’re not going to the judge certainly isn’t going to answer it anyone. But now, is it the law in Maryland, that if and I guess I think you already said that his lawyers dispute this. But if it were the case that he had a felony, not necessarily a violent one, but a felony as a juvenile that he would be banned. from owning a gun as an adult, so how it works? Do you know,

Jim Bovard 14:02
um, what the, what the police have said, If I recall exactly was that he had a juvenile offense, which prohibited him from owning firearms until the age of 30. So, now, the cops have said this, the cops have been vague, which I mean, the cops have had very little credibility on this case at this point. But the family says in the family lawyer say that’s not the case. There are there are a number of he said she said things here that I think some of them are going to be resolved as more facts come out, but you know, there really needs to be an independent investigation. And I would love to see the to see the emails and the other stuff. Prior to the SWAT team raid, what was their intent, were they you know, were they intending to open up shooting and if so, you know what gets them the right to kill the guy before he had a chance to raise his arms and surrender. I mean, it says it’s the same thing. It’s the same, you know, controversy that happened with the killing of Vicki Weaver. She’s standing there in the cabin door FBI sniper 200 yards away, blows her head off. And then afterwards Oh, I guess we should have done asked him to surrender first. Yeah, that’s that would certainly make you look better. So

Scott Horton 15:27
when he said that the information they say a tip, whatever information was that came in was a couple of months before so do we know whether they had a doesn’t sound like they had case the place that they, for example, they either didn’t know that he was, you know, shared a bed at night with a pregnant woman. Or they did know that and didn’t care and went ahead and attack the house like that anyway. Seems like probably they didn’t even know. It’s not like the guy was holed up in He probably left the house, just like with any of these, like, why didn’t they just wait for him to go to 711 and arrest him then?

Jim Bovard 16:07
Oh, sure, sure. I mean, it’s there was a parallel there with a david koresh case. I mean, the you had the ATF going in there with more than 70 agents for their operation Showtime as they called it. And, you know, they they launched a unprovoked attack on the grass davidians home, and then later told the press that they’ve been ambushed. What they didn’t tell the press is a david koresh and undercover ATF agents had gone out target shooting eight or 10 days before the ATF raid. They had an easy chance to arrest david koresh they chose not to do it. Instead, they you know, they brought in the television crews and they had their big try it but it didn’t turn out so well. But safer here. I mean, you know, it was like Duncan lamp was, you know, locked in his basement and not willing to come out. I mean, cops could have Pull him over. I asked him, you know, and I think he probably would have complied. I mean, he might have been very unhappy. But, you know, they had no reason to kill the guy. And this is what the whole case is about. They went and killed the guy they never gave him never gave him a warning. Apparently, they opened fired. And, you know, this is not someone that the police should have killed.

Scott Horton 17:24
All right now, so talk to me a little bit about and I guess this goes to the idea that maybe they were trolling his social media pages and this and that, because apparently they were doing the same to his family and saw that his family was planning a protest and tried to warn them that they better not, is that right?

Jim Bovard 17:40
Yeah, it was not his family planning, planning their protests. It was some folks, some activists who were planning the protests at montgomery county police headquarters, and and the and the family had a second signal online that they would be, you know, going to the event. The and so the county lawyer, county prosecutor Haley Roberts sends a warning letter to the limb Family Lawyer saying open source information indicates that your clients intend to participate in this plan protest over the killing of their son. Open Source apparently means that the cops are cracking limp family members online. You know, they got lots of extra time on their hands. And the prosecutor warned the family that the governor Huggins stay at home Warner does not does not include planned protests and warn them that they went to the protests that they could face. You know, $5,000 fine and a year in jail for violating Hogan’s locked down order.

Scott Horton 18:47
And then, so they they had the protest and you went and took some shots. So what was it like?

Jim Bovard 18:52
Um, well, it was, you know, I was careful not to recommend that people go to this protest ahead of time. Partly because the the at least one of the organizers was encouraging people to bring firearms to the event. Bringing bringing guns to a protest in Maryland is not legal. So I was, you know, I didn’t want to be encouraging people to go to a place where they would end up getting locked up. And the you know, Mike hearts one of the organizers posted a note on the afternoon before the event saying it’s illegal to demonstrate with arms in the state of Maryland. So So I suggest if anybody is bringing arms, let’s loophole this thing up, and don’t demonstrate just stand or walk around with your arms. I wouldn’t carry these signs If I were you, but I definitely wouldn’t mind taking a stroll with my rifle, that’s for sure. And so you had folks show up. I you know, about 10% of the people who showed up in the demonstration got arrested for firearms violations. That was after after things were Breaking up. But these are folks that ended up in jail because of that.

Scott Horton 20:04
This is a protest about cops murdering a guy, quite lawlessly. And these guys think they found a loophole in the protest with a rifle law that just don’t hold a sign, and you’ll get away with it and it’ll be alright.

Jim Bovard 20:20
Yeah, um, my hunch is, is that my hunch is that organizer did not go to law school. Um, yeah, I mean, this, this was the kind of advice that was being given. And, you know, I know I’ve gotten to lots of demonstrations and I’ve come close getting arrested a number of times, not for carrying weapons, but for other things pushing my luck but I made to see see this level of, well, basically reckless. I mean, you’re, you know, you’re basically encouraging people to come and dance, you know, I mean, basically do a do a less pretend and, you know, hopefully And it worked out badly for, you know, back in January, they had over 20,000 people show up for the gun rights protests in Richmond, over 20,000. So practically almost 1000 times as many as showed up for their protests on Saturday and at the montgomery county police headquarters. You didn’t have anybody getting arrested in Richmond. And here at Montgomery, you get you know, practically 10% of the attendees get arrested. So, anyhow.

Scott Horton 21:31
Yeah. Well, but so, the good part of the rally talk about that, because I think he said the rest really came after the whole thing was burning up anyway

Jim Bovard 21:39
Right. I mean, it was it was great to have a chance to meet lamps, some of the lamps, kinfolk, his aunt and uncle were there. Kathy and Matthew lamp, both very solid folks. they’ve both been outspoken on the online about this case and the outrage. It was great to have a chance to meet you Mercedes lampa his mother, I mean, you she’s had a horrendous loss. You’ve got government agents killing your firstborn son. And it was good to be able to talk with them and get a, you know, get a better sense of the overall how things went down. But, you know, as far as it’s great. It’s great that people are outraged by this case. It’s great that people were protesting. I think a focus protests would have been, hopefully that’ll happen down the road. But you know, basically, there was a lot of shouting and profanity and there are some folks who think that the shouting the F word at police has magical power. It doesn’t. But it was unfortunate because you had all three of those members of the LEM family, all of them are telegenic. All of them are, you know, can explain the case very well. And, you know, they weren’t, you know, encouraged to make statements. There wasn’t a video from them explaining, from their perspective, what happened or raising questions instead that was, you know, guys, you know, waving flags and shouting and, you know, marching around and, you know, hopefully, hopefully, there’ll be other, there’ll be other protests down the road that are organized differently.

Scott Horton 23:21
So, yeah. Well, you know, I think, you know, back to the first part of that about how good it is that people do care about this. I mean, you know, we’d like to think that the cops kill anybody in this way that they’re not just going to be forgotten. And somebody’s going to try to stick up for the truth and for accountability for this kind of thing. So that’s good.

Jim Bovard 23:44
Absolutely.

Scott Horton 23:46
But yeah, you’re right. It seems like you know, this kind of thing. Well, first of all, it’s it’s good that they didn’t arrest the family or anybody just for the violating the social distancing thing like they had threatened right.

Jim Bovard 23:59
Right, right now, it was, you know, it was interesting. There was a lot of animosity against the police there. And I was there as a journalist, not as a participant in the protests. So I got there about 15 minutes early. And it’s funny shortly, shortly after I got there, they the cop cars basically block the entrance roads on both sides to the police headquarters. But I’d already gotten in so I just parked right next to their headquarters and was out walking around. There were several policemen, you know, kind of hanging out in front of the big old headquarters. I said, Hey, guys, is it okay if I park over there? Oh, did you parked by a fire hydrant? No, I didn’t do that. Whoa, whoa, I guess it’s okay. You know, I had my press pass. I had my Nikon camera. So, and, you know, I was, you know, I was just, you know, I wanted to see what happened but I spoke to a number of police and they were, you know, civil. So I would guess it there are some montgomery county police who are very unhappy with how this went down. As far as a SWAT raid, because this is not Baltimore. I mean, in Baltimore, the Baltimore Police are notorious for lying for robbing people and for killing them. That’s not that’s not been the reputation of the montgomery county police at this time.

Scott Horton 25:19
Well, you know, there’s something that they could do about it. I mean.

Jim Bovard 25:24
Oh, absolutely. And it’s and it’s, you know, people well, you have to wait till the investigation is done is like, No, I mean, if you look at the statements that the police department has made so far, and also if you look at Maryland law, Maryland law gives a huge amount of procedural advantages to any placement who kills a private citizen. And it you know, it’s almost like, like a cover up as baked in from the time that a cop pulls the trigger. Something called the law enforcement officers Bill of Rights and it’s like, Yeah, well, it’s basically means that the cops have a right to shoot people. So and then they Five or 10 days before before they have to make a statement, any statement, and often the cops get to see the evidence has come in. And oh, okay. So this is the evidence. So this is what happened then. So you know, I mean, it’s something that the the ACLU has protested vigorously this state, a number of civil rights groups and other black groups have protested this, because it more certainly in Baltimore, the victims of police shootings tend to be black. So and this is something that has gotten media attention. The Baltimore Sun has done some good criticisms of this, but it hasn’t been enough to change the law. And so the law is still basically gives the laws totally slanted against the constitutional rights of anybody who gets shot by police.

Scott Horton 26:48
Yeah, well, and so to the other cops resenting it, they should push to have their paramilitary you know, SWAT force disbanded. I mean, If this is their problem is a crisis of confidence.

Jim Bovard 27:05
Yeah, great. Scott. That’s a good idea. I’ll send them an email.

Scott Horton 27:10
Yeah, man. Those guys I mean seriously and that’s really what’s going on here right is you have these guys who are really nothing but Deputy Sheriffs dressed up like, they’re the Navy SEAL Team Six or the Delta Force or something. And they’re essentially play acting. And, you know, you equip them all with MP fives, and with all the, you know, paramilitary armor and fatigues and whatever the black parachute pants and all of this stuff. Well, they’re looking for a fight. It’s amazing fact when you talk about in your in your first article here the statistics of how many SWAT raids that these guys do a year. I think you said it was 8000 over four years. I mean, where do they find the time and where do they find the victims to launch 2000 SWAT raids in a year. You know, and maybe that was for the whole state of Virginia, but still, I mean, that’s or Maryland, I mean, that’s still completely bananas and and it’s amazing actually that they don’t kill a lot more people than they actually do.

Jim Bovard 28:13
Um, I agree and it was so embarrassing for the state of Maryland, Maryland stopped counting. That was their solution. They didn’t change the law to make SWAT teams less dangerous. Instead, they just changed the laws so that people did not find out how many SWAT raids occurred. And this is typical of how state politicians deal with law enforcement abuses. This is the broader problem here because it goes to the heart of the governed, governed power that can quickly become tyranny and in a case like in a case like a duck and lumps killing. You got an innocent man laying in bed, who gets shot, fatally shot by the police with no warning. It’s like if something like something like Like this happened to a government official that oh my god, it’d be terrorism and you know, we got to have all these flags at half mast and, you know, we got to have new laws protect the government officials but it happens our private citizen as like a yeah is the ACLU might do something on this case, they’ve basically done almost nothing on it. Local media has basically ignored it. I’ve been kind of surprised by that. But maybe that will change. I don’t know.

Scott Horton 29:29
Well, you know, it’s the right wing, especially that they’ve got to count on all these guys waving their thin blue line flags and all of this stuff. And it’s just like with the war, if he loses the Republican Party, conservative rank and file Tea Party voters out there, who do you got left to support this stuff. And so like you were saying, they kill black people in Baltimore all day long. And they get away with that but they start turning against the support your local police faction, then the You’re gonna find that they don’t have really any support at all, and the support your local police faction are actually more well armed than they are when it comes down to it.

Jim Bovard 30:08
Well, and yeah, it’s an interesting thing that the here in Maryland, I mean, Maryland’s one of the most anti gun states and montgomery county is probably the most anti gun county in the entire state. But there are folks who were kind of raising eyebrows about this because it’s like, okay, so there was a SWAT team, a SWAT raid, that apparently started out shooting pre dawn, based on an anonymous tip that someone own firearms, it’s like, you know, there’s a lot of people in this county who own firearms, so probably at least 50,000 or 100,000. So most of them are gonna be out marching the street. Most of them are not going to be waving flags, but there’s a lot of quiet firearms owners here. So if they haven’t been banned by the government yet, yeah. You know, the government might. Some of the local politics was probably I like to do that. But, and it’s this is interesting too, because this is a very liberal county and I, and I’m not aware that any of the county council members have said a damn thing about this case, they have not paid any attention to it. You know, they’re, you know, they’re busy doing other photo ops or, you know, they’re busy, you know, doing well. I try to be I’m trying to be polite, it’s a struggle. But now it’s this you know, it hasn’t registered on the local radar screen. Um, it’s like this guy, you know, his life didn’t matter.

Scott Horton 31:35
Well, and you know, what’s gonna happen here too, is and just look at because of the social distancing restrictions or whatever how quick people are to pick up the phone and rat on their neighbors for taking a walk or whatever it is that they’re allegedly not supposed to be doing. And this is the perfect thing. For those who want to get other people in trouble. tell the cops they have a gun they’re not allowed to have and get them rated And you know, like there’s this swatting where you call and you say, Oh, I just killed my wife and I’m about to kill myself send the SWAT team immediately. And then you know, like a prank call kind of thing. But what about just actually snitching on people and calling the cops going, Oh, this guy’s got a gun. This guy’s got a gun. People will do that. I mean, some percentage of people be perfectly happy to call 911 on each other over anything. And if having a gun is the kind of thing that really get you in trouble, then they’ll call over that so people have a real reason to be concerned about this. It just anonymous tip can get you swatted at 4am huh?

Jim Bovard 32:39
Yeah, well, it was according to the police. It was an anonymous tip. I don’t know. Right. I don’t know if that’s accurate. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. But that was what apparently launched the investigation. And I think that they had I think that the affidavit will at least show that the police claimed have other sources of information before launching lots of pre dawn attack a violent attack on a peaceful household. So I mean, it’s it’s, it’s appalling the cops have not been compelled to answer more questions so far. I mean, there are you know, there was a case in New York, I think Newburgh, New York like that last month, there was a police shot a guy, and it was disputed what happened, there were riots and within 24 hours, the cop said, you know, made public part of the camp calm from the shooting, which showed that the guy pulled a gun on the cops. Down in Houston. You had that horrendous rate early last last year where the cops came in and killed two people in their 50s on bogus charges. You know, it was only two weeks later that the police chief came out and said look, we did wrong. I mean, this is a horrendous and horrendous abuse. You know, there were false charges that you know, the the entire Case melda to high heaven. So, here we are McGorry county six one on seven weeks. government hasn’t said crap on this.

Scott Horton 34:09
You know I’m pretty sure well I’m not sure where this statistic originally comes from but Radley belko has reported that there are 50,000 SWAT raids a year in this country. 1000 a week.

Jim Bovard 34:21
Yeah. And I think that’s from Peter Peter kraske, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University. He’s done some great work and and Radley belko has done great work on this issue for 20 years a lot of respect for him. Something which I want to mention too is a big thanks to all the people who have either shared or posted or tweeted on my earlier articles on the Duncan lamb killing that’s really helped the help make it visible. And this is a case people need to hear about because this this is what government has become. You know, government can carry off and carry out one of these raids before dawn, shoot and kill us. Someone and then not answer any questions. I mean, you know? Yep. And like you said, Thomas, I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Scott Horton 35:07
Well, they’re claiming that Oh, yeah, you know, the germs got us down, we’ll have to get back to you and that kind of thing. So it takes journalists like yourself and your readers to keep the heat on and make sure that they can’t just slink away on this.

Jim Bovard 35:22
Yeah. The readers and also you. This is the second time you’ve had me on to talk about this case. I appreciate that. And everybody knows that Scott Horton Lester’s are among the most savvy people out there.

Scott Horton 35:36
Yeah, you hear that all you savvy folks. So get your act together, do something helped to make this thing more of an issue than it already is and prevent them from getting away with this? You know, something cannot be done. It’s a matter of public pressure. It’s just a matter of, are they going to be allowed to skate or are they not and that’s up to the people, not just me. Maryland but of the US to make sure you know it justice. There’s an example going around where this woman claims that she was sexually assaulted by Joe Biden back in 1993. And the memo went out apparently, that we’re going to not cover this. And TV news and the major papers refused to even say her name or do a thing with it for weeks and weeks and weeks. And then even when you read the New York Times, and The Washington Post stories on it, when they finally did cover it, you can see how badly they’re trying to play it down. And yet, it’s not going away. And the reason it’s not going away is because the activists who care decided that they’re not going to let it It’s as simple as that and they’re going to keep the heat up. And if it wasn’t for them, it would already be over. And yet it’s still over and it’s not going to be allowed to die because they’re going to keep fighting about it. So there’s just a great example of the difference that can be made with a good article like this and some You know, important retweets and conversations being started by people about this and spreading the word about it. And it is, you know, we both made mention, or you know, reference earlier in the talk here about Ruby Ridge and Waco, and there are a lot of similarities. But then again, yeah, 50,000 of these things a year. What’s really notable about Ruby Ridge and waco was, they were right wingers, or at least perceived to be right wingers and their case of police abuse was championed by right wingers who most of the time are on their knees, licking cops boots all day. And so I think that that’s really important that people get up off of their knees and stop licking those boots and start to realize that hey, these other people who are complaining about police abuse, maybe they have a point. You know, if you were were protesting about what’s happened to Duncan lampe Then what about the Black Lives Matter, guys? And what about the you know, what’s his name? The football player taking a knee during the anthem and all that maybe the cops have been getting away with murder. Maybe there’s a problem that affects all of us here. Instead of just you know, this side versus that side. Maybe it’s the state versus the civilians, of all colors and all political leanings, you know?

Jim Bovard 38:19
Yep. It’s interesting on this limp case, it’s great how gun rights activists around the country are mentioning his name and invoking his name. You know, there’s a lot of JPEGs names out there I am Duncan lampe. Dr. Lim cannot be forgotten stuff like that. One other thing that might be a problem in this case is a Maryland government’s, you know, once again, going back to the building cover up, Baltimore has had so many police killings and so many police abuses, and Baltimore was famous for paying out a lot of money. Basically hush money because people that was who would be beaten or you Even worse or have their relatives killed by the police would get a settlement from the government, but it would be conditioned on them not talking to the media about the case. And I don’t know what the protocol is in montgomery county, I hope you know, I’m I’m guessing the family will have some type of a wrongful death lawsuit, it certainly seems justified against the police in the county. But I hope that there isn’t a muzzle that drops in on this because this is part of the reason why the police brutality and killings got so out of control in Baltimore, is because the the government paid off so many people and you know, but they were kept silent. So people didn’t, people didn’t realize how how widespread the cop cop abuses had become. And I I don’t know if that’s par for all Maryland counties, but that’s a concern in this cace.

Scott Horton 39:55
Well, so I think we may have talked about this last time, but I’m gonna go ahead and bring it up again. Because I think it’s just so insightful. So this great lawyer Scott Greenfield people might know him from Twitter. And he wrote this article called Tamir Rice’s basically reasonable murder. And people might remember Tamir Rice was the 12 year old boy with a toy gun at the park, and somebody called the cops on him. And even told the 911 dispatcher, well, I’m pretty sure it’s just a toy anyway, but he went out and call the cops. And so the cops came and they killed the kid that the cop jumped out of the passenger side, and didn’t even wait two seconds before he just blew the kid away. And so Scott ring, Scott Greenfield wrote this article, explaining that you know, how the law is that you’re not allowed to shoot me unless you can prove that you absolutely had no other choice. You had to you know, it was immediate and proportional to defend your own life or to defend another innocent person, something very close to that and all 50 states. That’s a lot but for a car There is no law that says it’s a crime for them to shoot you. Once they’re a cop. All those laws are completely suspended in their case. Now, the only question is, was it reasonable as in the term reasonable search and seizure of life, liberty or property in the fourth amendment to the US Constitution? That’s it. And so then what’s reasonable, of course, is only to be decided by other cops professional opinions, which means that any cop in America, all he has to do is say, furtive waistband, and they get away with it. Because everybody in every cop, every professionally trained cop knows that if someone is furtive and moves their hand toward their waistband, that then that’s the same as you know, threatening to kill you are close enough for government work. Now it’s reasonable to take your life and that was what the experts said about Tamir Rice. He may have been a 12 year old boy with a toy gun and they may not have have even given him a chance to drop the gun before they killed him. But that’s just tough because they’re government employees, they can do what they want. And this is for all you conservatives out there. This is what they call judicial activism. The judges just made this up on the Supreme Court. There is no state legislature that ever passed a law that said that there’s qualified immunity. In this case, it was the judges that refined it down and down and down to where essentially, even just a local Sheriff’s Department deputy badge is a license to kill in the United States of America. And, you know, go read that article, it’ll blow your mind because it goes through case after case of how they refine this down to the point where it’s essentially impossible. The only time a cop gets in trouble for killing somebody is if he beats his own wife to death on a Saturday night off the clock, which they do from time to time. But otherwise, they can pretty much get away with just about any crime.

Jim Bovard 42:58
Well, it’s it’s it’s It’s true that the laws and the court decisions have been horrendously biased. The Supreme Court decisions on qualified immunity, going back to the early 1980s had been a travesty. And they’ve You know, it is pretty close to a license to not just kill but rob people and, you know, bombed their houses and stuff like that. There have been some cases where police have been held liable, the Houston cases an example of their raid, that was completely based on lies. But if you look at the rate of successful prosecution for police killings, I think it’s probably less than 2%. And that doesn’t mean that every time that a cop shoots someone is amazed at the cops, a killer murder. There, there are lots of cases where cops shoot someone who’s robbing a bank, or who’s doing a violent crime, you know, ongoing, so those are completely different cases. There was there was a case here in montgomery. county last year, actually close to where I used to live on Randolph road, there was a gun store. And there were four or five guys, I guess from DC or from Annapolis, who decided to break into the gun store late at night. And the gun store had no video and the police got alarmed. And the, you know, the people kept robbing the gun store, even though when they figured the cops were on their way. A cop gotten the scene, the and the folks who were fleeing in their car, the cop shot at them killed and killed one of the gun store robbers, and the others were later arrested. And I’ve not heard anybody make any criticism of the cop who did the shooting because, yeah, okay, someone got killed, but it sounds like a clean shot.

Scott Horton 44:46
Yeah, well, I mean, the law is supposed to be that they’ve got to have demonstrated an immediate threat to somebody else. Certainly that would be the case if you had shot them. So just because someone’s getting away with some guns doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Way to kill somebody else with them, you know.

Jim Bovard 45:03
Yeah. There were some other circumstances, but I don’t I don’t recall hearing any criticism by, you know, civil liberties groups or other groups.

Scott Horton 45:15
I mean, if they were pointing guns out the window or something, I don’t know. But anyway, I mean, the point is that it doesn’t matter either way, because a cop could get away with it either way, if they just been robbing a cupcake store, and he wasted them, then there probably would have been much criticism of that either.

Jim Bovard 45:32
Well, okay. I mean,

Scott Horton 45:35
it’s certainly not by the district attorney’s office in the grand jury.

Jim Bovard 45:38
Yeah. Well, you know, Scott, that’s probably the reason I’ve always avoided cupcake stores.

Scott Horton 45:43
I can’t believe that they even have those things. I mean, I guess it’s, you know, at the height of the bubble.

Jim Bovard 45:48
Oh, my God. They seem again, you know, folks with for folks with more money than sense. It’s like, you spent $4 for a, you know, a cupcake, but I think it’s Two inches thick on the top is like, Hey, you know if the same price you could get two or three beers.

Scott Horton 46:06
Yeah, seriously and and how do you convince somebody to invest their money in something like that? That’s definitely it the bubble only kind of business there.

Jim Bovard 46:15
Yep. Certainly around here, it was a mania. Yeah, it’s unfortunate because we’re lots of good old fashioned bakeries, and they’re almost all gone. So instead, we’ve got these kind of, I guess, not unified. But you know, cupcake, places that I don’t know

Scott Horton 46:35
are yet to find and they won’t exist anymore. Now. They’re

Jim Bovard 46:38
That’s true. That’s true. The death rates could be real high for them.

Scott Horton 46:42
Yeah, for sure. Anyway, we’re off on a terrible tangent. probably a good time to stop. The great Jim bovard. Everybody reporting on the killing of Duncan limp by the Montgomery Montgomery County, Maryland SWAT team there last month. Thanks again, Jim.

Jim Bovard 46:58
Hey, Scott. Thanks so much for having me on.

Scott Horton 47:02
The Scott Horton show anti war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com antiwar.com, Scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org

Scott Horton 0:00
For Pacifica radio, April 19 2020. I’m Scott Horton. This is anti war radio.

All right, you guys, welcome to show. It is anti war radio. I’m your host, Scott Horton. I’m the editorial director of anti war calm and author of the book fool’s errand time to end the war in Afghanistan. If I my full interview archive, or the 5000 of them now going back to 2003 for you at scotthorton.org dot org. All right, you guys introducing William Arkin, this time writing for Newsweek, of course author of the book, American coup, and we spoke about a month ago about the military’s preparedness for the worst case scenario with outbreak of the Coronavirus here. And now he’s got a follow up article about it in Newsweek as Washington in DC faces Coronavirus, Spike secret military Task Force prepares to secure the Capitol. Welcome back to the show. Bill. How are you doing?

William Arkin 1:08
Hey, thanks for having me on. Again, Scott.

Scott Horton 1:10
Very happy to have you here and very interested in this piece. It seems like possibly the worst case scenario with the virus outbreak, at least for this spike has not come true. New York, of course, has been hit really hard and a lot of people have died. But I think we’re probably expecting things to be probably a bit worse than they are. And yet in this article, it doesn’t sound like that is reflected in the government’s plans here. They seem to be what it begins, you say that, you know, they’re worried about the plague crippling the capital, but I clicked on the Johns Hopkins map and it seems like the deaths are still in the low double digits over there. So I wonder about that. First of all,

William Arkin 1:56
well, I didn’t really write about what the conditions are necessarily. Rarely in Washington DC or the Capitol area, it was coincident with the fact that the mayor of DC and the governors of Virginia and Maryland in this week have also extended their states of emergency through the 15th of May. So, obviously, they see a persistence behind Coronavirus. And I’m now prognosticators as to what’s going to happen or what will happen to create the conditions under which our society will return to normal. But clearly the Washington DC area is different in two regards, one, that it is the confluence of three different jurisdictions and two that it is the seat of government. As a seat of government, I should also say where the White House is, at least in the form of the President and the Vice President doesn’t seem to be taking Coronavirus very seriously that is in terms of their own protection. As say, for instance, we saw after 911, where the President and the Vice President were virtually separated, and really severe continuity measures were put into effect. So right now we have this weird disconnect between the preparations of the military and civil government agencies responsible for continuity. That would be mostly FEMA, and what the White House is doing or not doing to make those preparations more relevant, more more capable. I wrote about the militaries contingency plans associated with Coronavirus Can continuity and mostly those plans manifest themselves in terms of the responsibility of the military to transport the Washington leadership out of Washington DC in the disaster now that is obviously a plan that is rooted in nuclear warfare or some kind of a W m d attack on the nation’s capital. The idea that the the leadership would have to be removed, whisked away from the city, but that but that also happens to be the plan that they’re implementing right now. And I write about how the helicopter force in the Washington DC area has been increased. In order to prepare for what is called the joint emergency evacuation plan. And for more secretive plans to evacuate the leaders of The executive branch, Congress and the judiciary, and then also how the air defense screen around Washington has been increased which is, is is like, I think the best example we can give you of sort of the disconnect between what are our actual threats, that is what Coronavirus actually means, versus what the military plans sort of prepare the military to do. So there they are. f 16th on alert and air defense units deployed to the Washington DC area to be ready to shoot down a hijacking plane when I would imagine that that’s the last thing that could possibly happen at this moment.

Scott Horton 5:49
And yeah, now to that what you mentioned about Trump not really being that engaged with all this it really sounds like it’s kind of all on autopilot but at the White House, they don’t really plan on following With any of this stuff?

William Arkin 6:02
Well, I think that that’s basically true that it’s that Donald Trump, the President of the United States, probably is disconnected from continuity and couldn’t care less, that he is gonna continue to be the performer on the stage. And that’s all that he’s focused on

Scott Horton 6:22
there in the F 16. Squad. They’re just they couldn’t care less that we’re at war with a tiny little germ and that their f6 teams are completely useless, and that they are useless and should have to get real job so they go on their stage and do their thing just like him. Well, the thing is just everybody going to work

William Arkin 6:42
does have some real consequences. And when the government puts the money and effort into the preparation of continuity plans and keeping those in a what are called a warm bass, so sort of warming them up, ready to implement Not only is it taking people away from Coronavirus work, but it also at the same time as is, is flirting with the idea that if there were a true disaster, that those who are responsible for continuity would in fact be the government. That is if the civil authorities themselves didn’t take continuity seriously. So we have this dangerous situation. I think it is dangerous, where you have this entire continuity of apparatus that’s working. And that apparatus is assuming that the leadership of the country that the constitutional government is going to follow through on the plans that have been written then on what they are preparing for, when in fact, the constitutional government is disconnected from those plans. So if there were an emergency, if there were disaster, I could imagine where the continuity operation would continue, where, let’s say second tier or third tier government officials would be evacuated. And that there would be even some friction between the constitutional rulers of our country and the continuity rulers of our country. So I want to see greater harmony between these two efforts. I want it to be more transparent. And I want it to be something that is well understood by the simple leaders and by the public, both so you can have greater confidence that continuity is meaningful and important, but also so that you preserve the very thing that you say you’re hoping to preserve, which is the rule of law and constitutional government.

Scott Horton 8:57
Hey guys, just real quick if you listen to the interview, Use only feed at the institute or at Scott Horton. org. I just want to make sure you know that I do a q&a show from time to time at Scott Horton. org slash show the old whole show feed. And so if you like that kind of thing, check that out there. Hey, guys, here’s how to support this show. You can donate various amounts at Scott Horton. org slash donate. We’ve got some great kickbacks for you there. Shop amazon.com by way of my link at Scott Horton. org, leave a good review for the show and iTunes and Stitcher. Tell a friend. Oh, yeah, and buy my books, fool’s errand time to end the war in Afghanistan and the great Ron Paul, the Scott Horton show interviews 2004 through 2019 and Thanks. Hey, guys, check out listen and think audio books. They’re listening think.com and of course on audible.com and they feature my book fool’s errand time to end the war in Afghanistan as well as brand new out in inside Syria by our friend Rhys, Eric, and a lot of other great books, mostly by libertarians there, Reese might be one exception. But essentially, they’re all libertarian audio books. And here’s how you can get a lifetime subscription to listen and think audiobooks. just donate $100 to the Scott Horton show at Scott Horton. org slash donate. So this thing really, I guess, it depends on who you’re reading about these kinds of things a lot of the time where sometimes, like, especially if you go back to the 1980s, and Rex 84, and garden plot and all that, and they’re talking about mass arrests. And, as a congressman jack Brooks put it, you know, at least in essence, suspending the entire constitution, and really having sort of a takeover of the government by this shadow government. And then other times, it’s just Donald Rumsfeld playing the president and they’re, they seem to just be screwing around practicing for nuclear war with Russia and all this kind of stuff like an Andrew Coburn’s book about Rumsfeld In the 1990s, where they were running these drills, and it seems like not serious in a way, but then the way you’re talking now It reminds me more of that earlier take on what Oliver North and them were up to in the 1980s, where this shadow government really is a threat to anything like whatever semblance of a constitutional government we still have in the presidency in the Congress and so forth.

William Arkin 11:27
Well, I think that a lot of the what’s written about continuity from the 1980s and before is really no longer relevant. That scheme of continuity is completely different today than it was during that time period. continuity is sort of been updated for the post nuclear era. And though it is still governed by and kind of influenced by the nuclear idea of a The obliteration of washington dc as a physical entity, the truth of the matter is that today, continuity is kind of a cottage industry that persists because it’s the responsible thing to do to have an ability to reconstitute the government, where it to be disabled, and also the constitutional thing to do, which is to ensure that there are lawful successors to the presidency. What we have instead is this hyper secret world, that that most people don’t understand that there’s a lot of rumor about that, that you and other people toss around Rex, alpha 84 and toss around Oliver North and Donald Rumsfeld, and they’re not really relevant today. what’s relevant today is that there is a constitutional apparatus that has been put in place and there is a continuity apparatus which has been put in place. And really the only question that any sane American should be asking is, are the two at odds with each other? Is there a scenario that could occur in which this so called shadow government, as you call it, what I’ll call the continuity system feels that it has either the need or the authority to take over. Now, that’s not going to be in the form of a lawful successor. We sort of saw that on 911. When in fact that the legal successors to the presidency, that is the Speaker of the House and the President Pro Tem of the Senate, were really ignored. And that and that, if, in fact, the President and the Vice President had been killed, we probably would have been faced with a constitutional question. ISIS in which some military officer or some representative of the military, and that includes Donald Rumsfeld, which I should remind the listeners is the fifth in line to be the president, not the second after the vice president becomes the president. So Donald Rumsfeld is not really even wouldn’t have really been in the chain of command in the constitutional way. And so today, again, we have a situation where I could imagine that the White House might look at the rules that relate to continuity and say to themselves, well, we had better prepare to make sure that Nancy Pelosi is protected and survives under all circumstances. Because if The President and the Vice President are disabled, she is the next in line to become president. That’s the lawful system which exists in our nation. But I think instead what has happened is we have this sort of secret continuity apparatus, which sees itself as being in charge, which sees itself as being important. And that apparatus is disconnected from the reality of what is happening in Washington. So I write about the creation of joint task force National Capital Region, which is sort of the wartime manifestation of the military’s presence in Washington DC. And I write about the real decisions and real orders that have gone out to ready the continuity, movers and the continuity, protectors of the middle Terry, to ready them to implement continuity if necessary. And yet at the same time, I feel like that apparatus is completely disconnected from both political reality and of course, whatever would happen in Washington. So either it’s a complete and utter waste of time and money and people, or it’s an extremely dangerous apparatus that needs to be smoked out, because we need to understand whether, in fact, it has powers that we’re not aware of.

Scott Horton 16:40
Alright, so before we get into the current orders as they’re being implemented right now, can we go back to 2001 for a second there, where he talked about, you know, the way that the continuity government plans were used at that time, that if cheney and bush had both been killed in the attack that it would not have gone to Dennis has The Speaker of the House at that time that it would have gone to this separate chain of command. But then the way you worded it was a little confusing to me. And I’m gonna get the quote, not perfectly right. But it was, I think the way you said it was as it was implemented. But as it was implemented, Bush and Cheney had both lived, and cheney was certainly the top dog in the pile of any big decisions like that being made. And so little just clarity there, if you could, if, who would have been in charge of deciding whether to go ahead and hand the keys over to Dennis Hastert or whether to give them to whoever they had in the separate chain of command here?

William Arkin 17:41
Well, if we can put ourselves back on to that day, Scott. And let’s remember, there was like, an hour long period where the President was out of touch with, with society with the news media. dick cheney was in a bunker deep under the White House, if you could imagine for a moment that follow on attacks had occurred or different type of attacks had occurred. It was possible that on September 11 2001, that the President and the Vice President would have both been disabled, killed, separated, unable to communicate.

Scott Horton 18:24
Yeah, the fourth plane was said to be headed toward the White House. So

William Arkin 18:27
right. And so on that day, dinner had Dennis Hastert who was the then speaker of was actually evacuated from Washington. And in the afternoon, he was taken to out whether that that’s a fact, there was a little bit of a tussle as to whether or not he wanted to go and then there was a question of, well, once he was there, what was his ability to even assert that he was The lawful successor to the presidency. The next in line was Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia. He was the president pro tem of the Senate. He refused to be evacuated, when in fact, I think he spent 911 at his townhouse on Capitol Hill watching television. So we we, we certainly faced the situation on 911. Where had there been this greater disaster actually contacting and giving those two successors to the presidency, the tools and the the means to be the lawful leaders of our country. We’re not in place. Now. We learned those lessons. And so therefore, in theory, we now have an apparatus that’s a post 911 apparatus, not a nuclear apparatus. One that has taken into consideration all of the lessons learned, if you will from from 911. And that apparatus today is very focused on making sure that it can evacuate leaders from Washington. That’s why the joint emergency evacuation plan and the Atlas plan are so important because those are practiced and ready to ensure that the successors to the presidency are evacuated from Washington if necessary. But I think a lot of people just don’t understand the system. And I think that there is a disharmony if you will, between the preparations that this apparatus goes through and, and and prepares for and and our acknowledgement that indeed, we would want to or would Hand over the country to to these people. So, so, again, I can’t imagine under the conditions, let’s say for instance where Congress were in session that Nancy Pelosi would somehow survive if if Donald Trump and Mike Pence were both disabled by Coronavirus. I mean, we’re talking then therefore about some, some extreme virus spread in the city. And, and so, really you have to ask the question, why do we even have this apparatus? what what what’s it even for? Because, because it’s not nimble enough to take into consideration what really needs to be done to protect the government and protect the government leadership. It’s kind of off in its own world and that’s why I like to write about It and to reveal as much about it as I can. Because it’s important that we understand this apparatus, and we understand that it sort of exists in its own world. Because I think that a big part of it existing in secret and in its own world, is that the actual plans and the actual procedures that would be implemented are unclear and perhaps even not what we would want. So to me, if you said to me today, well, Bill, you’re just speculating about continuity because they haven’t really done anything. I would say, okay, you’re right, Scott, that this, this is just a non issue. They don’t see an issue of continuity associated with Coronavirus and they haven’t implemented any of their plans or made any preparations. But the truth of the matter is that on March In March, in order was that when I went out to activate Joint Task Force National Capital Region, the continuity system was put in place in order to bring the base the continuity base up to this warm state, if you will. And the military units were put in place to evacuate the leadership if necessary, and those military units have been sequestered and protected and separated in order to ensure that they’re operating 24 seven, so they are implementing some kind of continuity scheme, and yet they’re not willing to talk about it. I when I talked to and reasoned with government officials to give official comment on what they’ve done. The answer I get is, well, we keep it secret because we don’t want the enemy to know it’s like not wanting the virus. To know, but also, they keep it secret because that’s the habit associated with these secret operations. And when I say to them, that greater transparency would give the public greater confidence that the government knew what it was doing, and that was doing something that was lawful. I just get back from people. Yeah. Okay, that makes some sense. But still, it’s gonna be super secret what we do in terms of continuity, and I don’t think that you can square those two, I think you either have to have transparency in which you admit that you’re fearful enough that you’re actually implementing continuity plans, or that you’re not fearful. And therefore, you’re not implementing continuity plans, because you don’t believe that we’re ever going to get to the point where we need to devolve the leadership of the country to other people.

Scott Horton 24:59
Yeah. All right. Well, so the last time we talked and in your last article, you explored kind of the nth degree of how far these powers could go, including martial law under the control of the Northern Command and that kind of thing. And now in this piece, it’s clear that it doesn’t look like we’re headed that far at all. But mostly you’re focused on this Atlas program and these things surrounding in DC. But so can you tell us, you know, more specifically what you learned other than what you were saying about the F 16, practicing intercepting cessnas and all this stuff?

William Arkin 25:30
Well, so we do have a continuity apparatus. It’s real. FEMA controls it at the civil level. And the Defense Department through Northern Command northcom controls it at the military level, the responsibility of the military is to transport and secure the successors under the continuity system. And so Joint Task Force National Capital Region, which has been Created is responsible for implementing the continuity plan and also for protecting the federal government’s workings and Washington DC. So not just the evacuation of leadership from the city but also if there were to be civil unrest in Washington DC. Now, you talk Scott as if Coronavirus is plateaued and finished and I don’t think we’re anywhere close to that. I think that life is going to return to normal anytime soon. So this ratcheting up of our preparations for continuity which means essentially, the evacuation of pockets of the government to alternate facilities outside of Washington DC and the preparation of a successor or alternate line of command than the president than the Vice President is going to continue. So no one is giving an order that saying okay, false alarm, guys Coronavirus is not so bad, you can stop doing what you’re doing in terms of preparing for continuity. In fact, it’s just the opposite. These units are becoming more and more separated and sequestered and protected in order to ensure that they’re able to carry out their wartime plans. So, to me, you have real plans, real units, real people, thousands of people who are now on alert, ready to implement continuity, when I think the public is completely and utterly in the dark and very confused as to why we would even need to have such emergency preparation

Scott Horton 28:00
Yeah, well, no, I didn’t say that the problem with the virus is solved. But at the same time, though they were talking about, you know, 10s and 10s and 10s of thousands more dead by this time, a month ago. And so it hasn’t gotten to the point where people are being triage out in the hallways in the parking lots and that that kind of crisis, obviously, lots of people are dying and are going to continue to die. But it doesn’t seem like there’s any threat to a single governorship or the rule of any state legislature, much less the White House and the Congress over the government. So it doesn’t seem

William Arkin 28:41
to disagree. You Scott, but then again, if you were interviewing the head of FEMA right now or the command or joint task force for National Capital Region, the question you would ask is, so why are you doing what you’re doing?

Scott Horton 28:54
Right, well, but as we started with, it’s just a government job. They’re gonna show up and do their best 16 practice, even if there’s not a virus in the air anywhere, just because, you know, that’s their deal until their orders change. But it’s a I think, Well, as you said, it’s either meaningful or it’s not. And if it’s not, you know, why are we doing it? I think it’s probably not that meaningful is my gut. Because the people who would they would be taking the power from, have no interest in giving it up? I mean, if we, we could have this conversation in a month and both Trump and Pence are in the ICU and things have changed. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying it’s impossible. But does it seem like we’re headed that way? You know, right now, so if they haven’t called Fars false alarm yet, I think they’re eventually going to, but I’m glad you’re concerned about it. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to play it down. It’s certainly I think, a threat to constitutional order, such as it is. But I’m not sure how immediate of one really

William Arkin 29:56
Well, again, I wouldn’t have written the article. I wouldn’t be concerned if it weren’t the case that they hadn’t expended millions of dollars and allocated thousands of people in order to be ready to implement these plans. So, especially at a time when the military itself is struggling with Coronavirus cases in their own ranks at a time when the National Guard and the military is itself suffering from Coronavirus. I mean we now have I think, as of today 600 plus members of the National Guard who have contracted Coronavirus and, and I think it’s well over 6000. Now in terms of military do DEA personnel so at a time when Human Resources are precious, allocating hundreds or thousands of people to emergency continuity plans in Washington DC is if nothing else, a monumental waste of money and resources, right? I would much prefer to see those people doing something else. But I do think it infects us. It infects our government with a certain presumption that there will always be some shadow government you call it you know, some people call it the deep state that will be available, regardless of what the contingencies are. And, and that theory of continuity, the one that does go back to the Eisenhower era when continuity first began and does go back to The nuclear era, this idea that somehow we need to have an extra constitutional apparatus is really what is most corrosive to the rule of law in our country, either we don’t need to have an extra constitutional apparatus and shouldn’t have one. And so therefore, we should have a continuity system that’s completely transparent and open. Or we do need to have an extra constitutional apparatus. And if we do, then I would like it to be constituted under the laws of our nation and not something that’s the product of secret orders. Right. So either way, we have a disconnect in terms of continuity. It’s like one of the one last bastions of actually Extra constitutional law which exists in our nation. And it’s either required because they can actually concoct scenarios in which it will be needed, in which case then let Congress deliberate and set the rules, or it’s something that has a life of its own and should be disbanded. Because we don’t live in a society where the threat of nuclear war is such anymore, that we need to have an extra constitutional structure.

Scott Horton 33:35
Now when Let’s hope it stays that way, as far as the cold war with Russia and China, but yeah, nothing like the old days, that’s for sure. Let me ask you one more thing, just almost as a note that I’m just curious, when they talk about the interagency This is a phrase that you cite in the piece, and it’s something that was made famous during Vin mins testimony during the impeachment hearings that the interagency had decided this and had decided that and I guess I just interpreted that to mean, like the deputies committee of the National Security Council, sort of deciding that this is what we’re doing, unless they can agree in which case they kick it upstairs kind of thing. But is that really right? or What is it? What exactly does that term mean to you?

William Arkin 34:19
Well, when people in the military say, interagency, they mean all that isn’t the military. When the media says interagency I think they mean what you just said, some deputies committee or principals committee of those people have all of the national security departments and agencies meeting together and, and, and making policy. So it can mean two very different things. When the military talks about interagency, the interagency as it relates to continuity. What they mean is all of the aspects of continuity that is what’s called the National continuity system. Of course the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff Strategic Command etc, has their own internal continuity system and generally, in order to make the distinction between national continuity and internal continuity, internal continuity is called continuity of operations coop and national continuity is called continuity of government cog. And so when you when I talked about continuity in this regard, I mean national continuity, we already know that Northern Command that’s the US base domestic command responsible for North America has sent an alternate staff to Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado and buttoned up and closed up And sequestered themselves away from Northern Command. That’s a continuity measure taken by northcom to ensure that there would be an alternate command structure word general O’Shaughnessy and others disabled. Similarly, Strategic Command has created an alternate command structure. And as far as I’m aware, the Pentagon has as well. So internal to each government agency, there’s sort of a responsibility to ensure continuity. And then at the national level, there’s a separate program, which exists to ensure succession to the presidency and the ability of a cabinet to deliberate the affairs of government.

Scott Horton 36:46
Okay, right on Well, I’ll let you go but thank you very much for your time bill. It’s been great.

William Arkin 36:51
Thank you for having me on again, Scott.

Scott Horton 36:53
Aren’t you guys that is William M. arkin from Newsweek newsweek.com exclusive, as watching in DC faces Coronavirus, Spike secret military Task Force prepares to secure the Capitol. Alright you guys and that has been anti war radio for this morning. Thanks very much again for listening. I’m your host, Scott Horton. I’m an anti war calm and the author of the book fool’s errand time to end the war in Afghanistan by my full interview archive more than 5000 of them now going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org. I’m here every Sunday morning from 830 to nine on kpfk 90.7 FM in LA. See you next week.