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Journalist Nasser Arrabyee is back to talk about what’s happening on the ground in Yemen. Arrabyee was on the show recently to explain why he was optimistic about negotiations between the numerous factions. Since then, the ceasefire agreement expired without being renewed. However, Arrabyee is still optimistic about the entire situation. In this episode, he explains why. 

Discussed on the show:

• 1833stopwar.com 

Nasser Arrabyee is a Yemeni journalist based in Sana’a, Yemen. He is the owner and director of Yemen-Now.com. You can follow him on Twitter @narrabyee.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot.

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William S. Lind, coauthor of The Next Conservatism, discusses his article “Why Conservatives Hate War;” how war damages social and cultural continuity while increasing the state’s power; conservative opposition to the World Wars and the Cold War (beyond the 1960s); a living wage for single-income family men; and the challenges of fighting fourth generation warfare.

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IPS News journalist Gareth Porter discusses how the media got it wrong about Israel being “on the verge” of war with Iran in 2010; former Mossad chief Meir Dagan’s warnings about Benjamin Netanyahu’s reckless bluster; why Israel’s military can’t possibly go-it-alone on Iran; and the obstacles preventing a diplomatic solution with Iran during Obama’s second term.

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http://dissentradio.com/radio/12_11_07_giraldi.mp3

Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi discusses the progress (or lack thereof) in the 11-year old war on terrorism; how Dick Cheney’s “One Percent Doctrine” continues to define US foreign policy; the defeat of Mitt Romney and his neoconservative advisors; and why Chas Freeman would be a great replacement for Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

Transcript

Scott Horton: All right. You guys don’t want to talk about the election. Neither do I. Let’s talk about something important, something that as best I can tell will be unchanged by the election, no matter which way it went, and that’s the permanent war on terror, “Cheney’s grim vision,” as I think it was the Seattle Times called it back in 2001 [ed: San Francisco Chronicle, James Sterngold, January 15, 2004]. Our guest is Philip Giraldi, also from the American Conservative magazine like our previous guest, Bill Lind. He’s the executive director of the Council for the National Interest, which sponsors this show, and of course he writes a regular column for Antiwar.com. Welcome back, Phil. How’s it going?

Philip Giraldi: I’m fine, Scott. How about you?

Horton: I’m doing good. Appreciate you joining us today. So, you know, what I want to ask you about, since I don’t want to talk about really Barack Obama or Mitt Romney necessarily, but I do kind of want to take the occasion of the presidential election yesterday and the reelection of President Obama to kind of do a little bit of a review of the terror war so far, 11 years in, and where we’re headed, that kind of thing. I posted on my Facebook page “Obama-Karzai 2024,” because that’s the deal that they signed, and I just wonder, you know, I don’t know, what’s a former CIA officer, counterterrorism officer like yourself, think of all this? Didn’t you tell me you were at CIA headquarters on September 11th?

Giraldi: Yeah, I was. Right. Right. And there was a panic like you wouldn’t have believed. (laughs) Everybody –

Horton: America’s finest and bravest, right?

Giraldi: Yeah, everybody was pouring out of the building to get into the parking lot, so it was fun to watch.

Horton: (laughs) All right. So, and now – look, I’m living in this same world as you, and I’m pretty sure you’ve been looking at this slowest motionest train wreck ever unfolding before your very eyes pretty much the same way I have this whole time. I mean, it was just – it was that night really that they announced that, “Yeah, never mind Al Qaeda, we’re going to use this opportunity to go to war with whoever we feel like. World, watch out.”

Giraldi: Yeah. Yeah. Well that eventually evolved into the Cheney, you know, 1% solution, which was that any threat out there that’s even 1% credible had to be met with a military response, and that’s where we’ve (laughs) – basically, that where we’ve gotten where we are today.

Horton: Yeah. All right, well, so, now as far as the war in Afghanistan – you know, I don’t know, say somebody reasonable had been in power (laughs), you know, magically, and they had hired someone like you or someone else reasonable to advise them on what actually ought to be done. How different would that thing have worked? I mean, would you still have gone for regime change in Kabul against the Taliban? Or would you have just limited the war to Zawahiri and bin Laden? Or what’s the deal there?

Giraldi: Well, you know, it’s again one of these things that’s kind of complicated and there are a lot of what ifs. There clearly is evidence from the Swiss embassy that the Taliban were making overtures to the United States to come up with some kind of evidence that Osama bin Laden had actually been behind 9/11, that they were willing to give him up. And of course the United States has never been able to make any kind of reasonable case that he was involved with it. So, you know, if we had somehow managed to cobble together even a vaguely plausible case, probably none of the invasion or the consequences would have happened.

Now, you know, ratcheting ahead, in terms of what happened and didn’t happen, clearly we had an interest in using military force in Afghanistan to remove Al Qaeda. There’s no question about it. But, the problem becomes with, you know, the aftermath of that. The aftermath of that, there was no plan, there was no end game, there was no way to get out of this thing, and instead of doing anything sensible, all they’ve done is stay there for an extra 11 years. And we gained nothing whatsoever out of it.

Horton: Yeah. And of course, and you know I got the very best version of this audio that I think anybody’s ever gotten – it was on TV just the other night. It’s a clip of Richard Clarke. He’s told the same story many, many times, but this is the clearest version of it ever where, the day of September 11th, before anyone in America could have really been 100% certain the attack was even over, right?, the guys on the National Security Council and throughout the White House and the Pentagon were talking about Iraq, and we got to figure out a way to blame Saddam Hussein for this – and they weren’t even interested even in going to Afghanistan at all. Apparently Colin Powell had to cry and beg them to, “Come on, you got to at least hit Afghanistan first or the world just isn’t going to understand (laughs) what the hell you’re doing,” you know?

Giraldi: Yeah, that’s right. Well, you know, obviously the whole discussion of doing something about Iraq started as soon as the Bush administration came in, way before 9/11. So this was kind of on the back burner. This was a neocon policy right from the beginning because Iraq was seen as a destabilizing force in the region, as a country that was supporting the Palestinians, that was supporting – quote, “supporting” terrorism. You know, that kind of thing. It was the usual rhetoric that we are now hearing about Iran. And it’s – I don’t know, somehow these things never go away.

I mean, one thing that came out of yesterday’s election is I am amazingly relieved that the neocons hopefully are gone forever now. I mean, I assume they’re still going to be hanging around the fringes of the Republican party, but the fact is what they represent and everything has finally been, I think, put to rest.

Horton: Well, I sure hope that’s right. I mean, they’re discrediting (laughs) – these are the people who denounce Ronald Reagan for surrendering to the Commies in 1989! I mean, they’re undiscreditable, I’m pretty sure.

Giraldi: Yeah, yeah. Well, they’re getting older now, so maybe they’ll just (laughs) disappear one at a time. I mean, it’s really, you know, scary stuff.

I thought I’d feel a lot better today with Mitt Romney losing, but actually I don’t because I’ve started thinking again about all the terrible things that Obama’s been doing. And I think that we in the antiwar community have to really focus on keeping, you know, keeping the light on these issues, and things like targeted killing, and assassination of American citizens, the use of drones in general, the hostility that we’ve been cranking up against countries like Russia and China and Iran. I mean, there are so many issues that Obama could have been a lot better, and we have to hope that now that he’s not worried about being reelected he actually will do some things that are good for the country.

Horton: Yeah, well, you know (laughs), who was it just a minute ago was saying, “Well, you know, there’s the midterms of 2006.”

Giraldi: Yeah, you’re right.

Horton: (laughs) There’s always an excuse. Yeah, I think it was Bill Lind said that at the beginning of the show. They’ll always have an excuse.

But, yeah, you know, I mean, look at right now in Iraq, you have, what, Sunni Iraqistan or whatever it’s called now that the country’s more or less been divided. I mean, don’t the Sunni-dominated provinces of Iraq sort of have autonomy the same way the Kurds do at this point from the Shiite government that rules between Baghdad and Basra? And then aren’t they now just exporting jihadists to fight on the same side as America and the same side as Zawahiri against Bashar al-Assad in Syria?

I mean, what in the hell – this is where my imagination of how power works in DC starts breaking down a little bit. Usually I’m pretty good at imagining a conversation at the National Security Council or something. But how in the hell do they fight a war directly for Al Qaeda in Syria and then even discuss it among themselves? I mean, somebody’s got to be keeping a record of some of these conversations, right? How are they doing this?

Giraldi: Yeah, I agree with you 100%. And what astonishes me is that probably if you look back on the archives of your show, we were probably talking about these issues five and six months ago, and why does it take the National Security Council, with a whole lot more information and a whole lot of really smart people – self-defined, of course – why can’t they come up with this stuff that you and I could figure out a long time ago, that this is the way it was going to go? And yet they don’t seem to get the message. And it’s just absolutely astonishing that this can happen over and over and over again.

And the one, again, ray of light I see on this, it’s clear, I think, that from Hillary Clinton’s idiotic comments last weekend and also from some of the stuff coming out of the White House, that they’ve gotten very goosy about Syria. They realize it’s going south already. And maybe, you know, maybe after Libya and after Syria and after maybe another horrible example, God knows where, Mali, they’ll start to figure these things out. But there’s no room for optimism on this because they don’t seem to have a learning curve.

Horton: Yeah, I mean – you know, I’ve got to say. I’m disappointed, really. I mean, I never trusted Hillary Clinton’s motives ever or her judgment really at all. But she seems like a smart lady. I can’t but help but think back to, you know, at least how well briefed she was and how well she understood her briefings before her Senate confirmation hearings for Secretary of State. I mean, she’s one really sharp broad. She knows a whole lot about a whole lot of stuff. And then she does things like fight against Khamis Gaddafi for the jihadists in Libya! What?

Giraldi: Yeah.

Horton: And then as soon as they’re done winning, she exports some of them to go fight a jihad in Syria. I mean, okay, I know you like Benjamin Netanyahu a lot and so therefore you dislike Bashar al-Assad, but come on, man! I mean, this is going to be a real problem, this whole, you know, deliberately importing jihadists from Iraq into Syria especially, and from Saudi Arabia.

Giraldi: Yeah, well, I mean, like the whole suggestion last week that the political council that runs the Syrian Free Army, or Free Syrian Army, should be revamped, and we America kids will pick out the people to replace them. You know, that was going to go over well with the Russians and with everybody else? It’s just that, you know, we seem to live in a cocoon that’s shaped by our own hubris about what we think we can get away with. But, you know, this window’s been closing for a long time, and nobody’s buying into this stuff anymore.

Horton: Yeah, well, on the other hand, though, they don’t really need to, right? I mean, they can just keep failing and following their failure hither and yon. I mean, it really does work perfectly.

Giraldi: Yeah, it’s like 1984, you know. They can always claim that f-n defeat is victory and there’s no lie that’s too big for them to be able to exploit.

Horton: Right. Yeah, I mean it’s just like saying, “Hey, if we don’t bail out the banks, the economy will suffer.” But wait, the economy is suffering because you bailed out the banks last time! I mean, that’s where the bubble came from, all that new funny money to prop up all these ailing old institutions, that’s what created the bubble that created the crisis this time. But, oh well, doesn’t matter, history began yesterday, we got to do it or else something bad will happen.

Giraldi: Well, we need the Bain Capital solution, which is basically to put everybody out of business and give money directly to the people that are running the government.

Horton: Right. And then, you know, who needs trade? We’ll just all get food and water from the National Guard when they come by our neighborhood watch, you know, every evening or whatever. You know, rations.

Giraldi: Yeah. Yeah. You know, it’s a strange world, I tell you. When you think about the choices that Americans have in terms of their political leadership and how the system has evolved into a virtual oligarchy which is controlled by a group of insiders who basically transcend the two major political parties. They are the ones that are important. And these people keep getting richer and richer and more and more powerful and creating laws and systems that benefit themselves, and the rest of the people get screwed. But the American people can’t quite figure it out yet. Maybe it’ll happen in our lifetimes. I hope so.

Horton: Now, here’s the thing. This whole policy has been so counterproductive, you know, compared to the American people’s goals anyway, who – you know, the American people did give permission to George Bush to go kill bin Laden and his friends, please, or whatever. You know, that was the one mandate that they did have, and the whole everything else they’ve been up to has been so contrary to that.

And yet, I thought the New York Times actually, and for the first time ever as far as I know, did a really good job on this issue the other day where they said, you know, there’s more and more movements around the world, especially of course in Africa and in the Middle East where people sort of believe like bin Laden do. But the one thing that they don’t have in common, the one thing that really made bin Laden and Zawahiri’s project unique, was that they wanted to attack the United States, because they say we’re not going to be able to win any of our local revolutions until we win the big one against the empire that’s propping up all of our local kings, and that kind of thing. And so, but none of the rest of them ever believed that. You know, the rest of them all just still wanted to fight the King of Jordan or fight Hosni Mubarak or fight Saleh in Yemen, or fight whatever whatever. So, in other words, it was the New York Times was actually sort of saying, well, jeez, it really doesn’t matter to us if Al Qaeda-ish dudes take over North Mali because so what? Like, Mali has direct access to New York City or something.

Giraldi: Right. That’s exactly right. That’s the key to this whole thing, this whole war on terror, it’s basically what you have, even though they would deny it, is you’ve had the United States government since 2001 declaring war on all Islamists. I mean, Islamist is a very, you know, elastic definition. It’s basically someone who is a religious Muslim and who is involved in local politics. So that’s an Islamist.

But the reality is that, you know, all Islamists are not basically radicals. I mean, they’re just believers in many cases. And even the ones that are radicals, very, very few of them are actually something like terrorists that threaten the United States. So, here we’ve declared war on a whole huge category of people and really there’s only a tiny sliver of this within this category that are people that really we should be worrying about.

Horton: Yeah, well, and you know if our government really did have the motive of trying to defuse all this sentiment against us, it would seem like they would want to stop setting people on fire and then screaming at their dying corpses that this is the American way. You know?

Giraldi: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they really don’t have a clue. And that’s what bothers me about all this. I don’t know whether it’s just hubris, or if it’s just – are they getting such bad advice? I mean, you know, I – I can’t even figure it out. I mean, why are these decisions and why are these thought processes always so bad and always so wrong? It’s just, it’s a mystery. You know, you and I could sit down and figure out these things a lot faster than they can.

Horton: I think a big part of it just would be having to admit how full of it they’ve been all this time. You know? I mean, when you –

Giraldi: Well, yeah, yeah, I could see that if I were a Republican, but I mean, Obama – well, of course Obama has adopted the Republican agenda, and he had a chance to break from it but he, I guess he didn’t have the nerve, or he didn’t, wasn’t convinced enough that he could do it – I don’t know what it was, but now with his second term, you know, you’re right, he’s going to be looking over his shoulder for midterms, no question about it. But, you know, he certainly is in a position to maybe take some even baby steps in the right direction. I saw – I don’t know if you saw it. There was an article, somewhat joking, the other day where somebody suggested that when Hillary Clinton leaves as Secretary of State, the great move would be to Barack Obama to immediately appoint Chas Freeman as Secretary of State.

Horton: Oh, man, wouldn’t that be great?

Giraldi: (laughing) I thought that was tremendous.

Horton: For people who aren’t aware, this guy Freeman, he was sort of a civil servant intelligence officer type. Phil, you may know his bio exactly. But he was nominated to be the chair of the National Intelligence Council, which is very important. This is where all the intelligence agencies come together to agree to lie us into war or not to, I guess, and he was going to tell the truth, and so the neocons sabotaged the hell out of him and Obama with– or, you know, basically forced him to withdraw his own nomination, right? A couple years back.

Giraldi: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, this guy was as experienced a diplomat and intelligence expert as you’re ever going to find. He was ambassador to Saudi Arabia. He’s an expert on China. He speaks a number of languages. I mean, the guy’s brilliant. And if you’ve ever heard him speak, he’s compelling even as a speaker. And, you know, he was basically torpedoed because they didn’t want an independent voice or somebody who would speak the truth in the corridors of power.

Horton: Yeah, well, you know, I am not expecting Obama to do anything brave. And in fact, even as far as these talks with – they’ve announced they want to have talks and resolve the pretended Iranian issue – I don’t expect things to change from, you know, the fall of ’09 or the spring of ‘010 where they pretended like they wanted to make a deal, but they didn’t want to make a deal, they were just pretending, and they – in fact, the Iranians are like, “Okay, we’ll do it.” And then Obama’s like, “No, I refuse to accept your acceptance of my offer. Get out of my face.”

Giraldi: Yeah. That’s exactly what happened.

Horton: It’s amazing, isn’t it? But, hey, they’re getting right away with it. But, you know, I don’t know. I mean I guess I hold out some hope. At least it ain’t Romney. You know, that’s all I can say. I’m not the slightest bit pleased that it’s Obama, but, like you were saying, the neoconservatives, not only did they take a hit in this thing, they – it’s really, more than that, they didn’t get the massive promotion that they were possibly going to get. I mean, just imagine to have the next Doug Feith as the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy and repeating the whole first four years of George Bush Jr. kind of a thing. I prefer the stale old crew that nobody likes anymore to a fresh-faced team of neoconservative lunatics in charge.

Giraldi: Yeah, and plus there are some interesting signs within the Obama administration in terms of how they have more or less figured out that the humanitarian interventionism is not working quite the way it should be working, so some of the voices in the administration that have been supporting that kind of thing have been somewhat muted. And, you know, I think there is a reluctance on the part of Obama to get into these things, to a certain extent, because they don’t work, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. So hopefully there are some little shifts that are going to take place, and I would like to see some big shifts, but I guess we’ll just have to hope for that.

Horton: Yeah. All right now, as far as, you know, somebody’s willing to blow himself up in a truck bomb here in the States, we have seen, eh, sort of a half-assed attempt in the Detroit attack and again in Faisal Shahzad in 2010, he tried to blow up Times Square.

I think that one especially was just a matter of luck, right? That whoever it was trained him how to make that bomb, they just didn’t do a good enough job, he wasn’t capable of pulling it off. But if we just imagine and pretend it had been a decent enough, you know, decently made thing, it could have killed, I don’t know, tens or hundreds of people. It would have been a history-changing thing, not necessarily September 11th size, but it would have, could have been huge for, you know, further effects on our liberty, that kind of thing here at home, or even, you know, maybe justifying a strike against Iran or whoever they want to point their finger at, you know, if they can frame up whichever enemy they feel like attacking best or whatever.

So I wonder, you know, what you think is the danger. After all, the U.S. has been killing people nonstop in the Middle East for a long time now and making more and more enemies. That’s what even McChrystal says, every time we kill somebody we create ten more enemies. How many of these guys are actually going to be willing to come to the United States and, you know, try again to do September 11th type attacks against American civilians, do you think?

Giraldi: Well, I mean, that’s a tough one to answer, of course. I mean, there will always be people that are willing to do that, but I would argue that there are very few of them, and even fewer of them that have any capability actually to do it. And bear in mind, I mean, the attack at Times Square, what did he say? He said he was doing it out of revenge for the fact that his family was being attacked by drones in Pakistan. So, you always have to look to the ultimate cause, when you’re being attacked, when you’re being victimized in a way – how did this start? Where does it come from?

And the United States basically is in a position now where it is, as you note, creating more enemies than it’s succeeding in killing, and it’s doing that because it’s, you know, discovered the wrong solution to the problem. The solution to the problem is not, you know, drone warfare, is not supporting corrupt regimes in various places. You know, there are other ways for the United States to deal with these issues, and we’ve never even tried them, in the last 10 years certainly.

Horton: Right. Yeah, I’m trying to kind of skate this fine line where these guys in, you know, Syria or Libya, down in Mali, maybe they’re Al Qaeda enough where I can accuse Obama and Clinton of backing these Al Qaeda-like guys, but then again they’re not Al Qaeda enough that I think that’s an excuse to war against them either? You know, is that possible? Can I have that? That it’s horrible and hypocritical that they support the mujahideen but I’m not saying they should fight them, I’m just saying call it off.

Giraldi: Well, Mitt Romney was claiming that Obama was supporting terrorists. I mean, you know, it’s like all this stuff is a question of how you want to distort the reality of what you’re seeing, and in Syria –

Horton: Well, I mean, in Syria, we’re on the side of the suicide bombers there, right?

Giraldi: Yeah, absolutely. That must be the case. I mean, it’s just absolutely crazy. I mean, Mitt Rom– we weren’t going to talk about the election, but Mitt Romney was so ignorant of anything having to do with anything in the world that it was astonishing that he could even pretend. I mean, he couldn’t even get the words right when he was trying to explain things or even get the geography right of places that he was talking about. I mean, this is – are we doomed, you know, to have nothing but idiots running for president? You know, what has happened to this country?

Horton: Yeah, that was really something, especially watching Romney. And, you know, even the New York Times called him out for this, were like, “Yeah, Romney mentioned Mali three times in the debate last night. We’re pretty sure that that was just something big and bold in a heading in his morning briefing that he still has no idea where it is, doesn’t know the first thing about it, and his criticism of Obama on Mali is that he’s backing Sunni radicals there but that, in the same breath, he’s not doing enough to back the Sunni radicals in Syria. And in fact, the same breath, he’s allowed the Sunni radicals that he fought for in Libya to attack him in Libya.

Giraldi: Yeah, well, that’s it. I mean, you know, it’s a case of if you assume that every Muslim in the world is out to get us, then you can make a case for anything you want.

Horton: Yeah, exactly. All right, hey, thanks, Phil, I really appreciate talking with you, as always.

Giraldi: Okay, Scott. Take care.

Horton: All right, everybody, that’s Phil Giraldi from the Council for the National Interest, councilforthenationalinterest.org, the American Conservative magazine, and Antiwar.com. See y’all Friday.

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Clive Stafford Smith, author of The Injustice System, discusses how the US and UK colluded to commit war crimes in the illegal detention of Yunus Rahmatullah; the misleading recidivism rate of ex-Guantanamo prisoners; how the “noble corruption” of well-intentioned police and prosecutors is destroying the justice system; and why retired high-level US politicians had better think twice about vacationing in Europe.

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Jeremiah Goulka, a TomDispatch regular, discusses “The Urge to Bomb Iran;” the power and influence of neoconservatives; war-and-peace policy differences between Obama and Romney; a partial list of Romney’s foreign policy advisors; the fevered dreams of pro-MEK regime change hawks; and why it’s no fun arguing with intellectually dishonest people.

 

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Muhammad Sahimi, Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Southern California, discusses “the unfolding human catastrophe in Iran” from US-imposed sanctions; the Obama administration’s lies about “smart, targeted” sanctions that hurt the Iranian government, not the people; why the US’s real goal is regime change, not curtailing Iran’s nuclear enrichment program; what General Martin Dempsey really meant when he said “I don’t want to be complicit” if Israel attacks Iran; and the difference between real reform movements and Western-funded separatists.

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Constitutional attorney and author John Whitehead discusses the US government’s authorization of drone aircraft for domestic law enforcement and surveillance (public and private); the estimated 30,000 drones of all shapes and sizes that will be in service by 2020; the fate of former Marine Brandon Raub, who was forcibly institutionalized for controversial Facebook postings; the many veterans being pestered by FBI and DHS for exercising their First Amendment rights; The Rutherford Institute’s model legislation for preserving civil liberties and slowing the drone invasion; and the chilling effect “weapons of compliance” have on protest-minded Americans.

Scott Horton Interviews John Whitehead
The Scott Horton Show
November 2, 2012

Transcript

Scott Horton: All right, y’all, welcome back to the show. I’m Scott Horton and this is my show. Our next guest is John Whitehead. He’s an attorney and author with the Rutherford Institute. You might remember we talked with him about the government’s kidnapping of that veteran for posting lyrics on his Facebook page a few weeks back. Welcome back to the show. How are you?

John Whitehead: Hey, thank you, I’m doing fine.

Scott Horton: By the way, what ever happened with that?

John Whitehead: What happened was we got him out in about a week. He was in there. A judge finally released him, said there was no grounds to keep Brandon Raub, and now we’re preparing a federal civil rights lawsuit against the agencies involved.

Scott Horton: Good times. All right. Well –

John Whitehead: So he’s ready to go and we’ve got a cadre of lawyers, and we kind of want to send the signal – what we found out after we got involved in that case is a lot of veterans were coming to us saying they had been contacted by the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security for posting things on their website or their Facebook page, which is kind of dangerous since we have the First Amendment in America which says you have the right to free speech. And so we would like to slow the agencies down and get them to stop harassing veterans.

Scott Horton: They are just scared to death of their own Pretorius, right? [crosstalk] Give them a rifle and teach them to kill and then uh oh.

John Whitehead: They are. They’re scared to death of the [inaudible]. They’re doing a number of – y’all, again, starting in 2009 basically I first saw it is that veterans were dangerous, they have to be contained, but again we have a Constitution in America and that’s what we want to protect.

Scott Horton: Yeah. All right. So, now, I want to talk with you about the drones. And you guys I believe are leading this, spearheading this movement to submit model legislation to the 50 state governments –

John Whitehead: Yes.

Scott Horton: – to get the state governments to ban, to some degree, I don’t know, I’ll let you explain, the use of drones by civilian police agencies against us.

John Whitehead: Yes. Actually we’ve floated one to the Senate Judiciary Committee, model legislation, and then we sent it to all 50 states, to their state legislatures. It’s called the Freedom from Drone Surveillance Act. But just a little background. The problem with drones, and President Obama signed the law into effect not too long ago which by 2015 which will allow drones to be flying over the country. The estimate by the FAA right now is about 30,000 drones will be crossing America by 2020. That’s a lot of drones.

If you go to our website, rutherford.org, it would be good to go and read the articles I’ve written on drones so you can get educated on them. I’m talking to your listeners here. Because you need to understand what drones are. They’re a new form of technology, but usually they’re aerial unmanned vehicles that are usually remote controlled by some troops or believe it or not college students on the ground, and they’ve been used in Afghanistan and Iraq as war weapons where a number of casualties have appeared.

But what the drones will be equipped with will be antipersonnel devices such as tasers, rubber bullets, lasers, things to repel basically protesters. They will have facial recognition software. This is all footnoted stuff, so I’m not making anything up here. Probably scanning devices that look– so they’ll be able to see through walls. So if you’re in your home they’ll be able to see you moving about in your home. So, again, they’ll have all these devices – [crosstalk]

Scott Horton: And, by the way, pardon me for interrupting, John, but I just wanted to say that that’s not magic or anything, it’s just sophisticated radar and computers interpreting numbers that they’re getting or whatever. That’s not – it may sound fanciful – “Oh, yeah, see through walls,” but it’s not Superman x-ray vision or something like that.

[crosstalk]

John Whitehead: No, they’ll be able to see images. In other words, they’ll be able to see what, you know – I think it will get to be quite sophisticated eventually. They’ll be able to see pretty clearly what you’re doing in your home. So what we did is we came up – and I actually talked to a few drone experts, the guys that actually own drones. I had a fellow this summer that actually came in and visited me for quite a while. He had drones in his car, two small ones, and he showed me how they operated and those kind of things, but that’s one of the problems is there’s going to be a lot of private individuals and corporations with drones. They’ll also be recording what they see in the sky. What you’re doing on the street. They’ll have infrared technology. That’s already been announced. They’ll be able to see people walking at night. So they’ll have a lot of capabilities.

So what we did is we came up with a law basically saying that any information collected by a drone cannot be used against American citizens in a court of law. That would include private drones. What you will have is the police will actually be downloading what people have recorded on their own private drones.

And, again, like I say, if you go to our website and read some of the stuff that I’ve written on it.

They have a drone now, supposedly, the government, that is as small as a mosquito. They have a hummingbird drone. You can actually go on YouTube, and I would do this, go on YouTube and watch this hummingbird drone. It’s going to get so sophisticated that if you go out in your yard and there’s a hummingbird there, you won’t know the difference between the hummingbird and the drone. And they also have seagull drones.

So, these things are going to be very sophisticated. They’re going to be able to watch everything you’re doing. So the question is, should they be used against the American public, and we’re saying no. And then we’re saying, unless there’s a national emergency declared by the President of the United States, they can’t have antipersonnel weapons on them. In other words, dispersing crowds. I think that you’ll see them – [crosstalk]

Scott Horton: Okay, now, let me just play devil’s advocate here for a second, right?

John Whitehead: Sure.

Scott Horton: Because every county sheriff in America – and that’s, what, 18,000 of them or something? They’re going to have reasons they need these things.

John Whitehead: They’re going to want these drones.

Scott Horton: Right? And you and I could just sit here for like five minutes and think of a hundred excuses that they’re going to come up with.

John Whitehead: Oh, sure.

Scott Horton: For all of these things. Including using shotguns. I mean, come on, officer safety is the single highest principle in American society. If – you could get, you know, life in prison for killing a cop’s dog.

John Whitehead: Mhmm.

Scott Horton: So, you know, they’re better than soldiers. They’re better than demigods. Their lives have 10,000 times the value of a regular mundane, as Will Grigg says. So how in the world could you expect that the state legislatures are ever going to allow a cop to put his life in danger again when he could simply fly his remote-controlled plane over there and kill whoever it is he wants to kill?

John Whitehead: Yeah, I don’t think so. I mean, I’m going to be honest with you. I think there are a couple of state legislatures that have contacted us. They’re interested in passing these, but these I would say, they’re the exception to the rule. To get any kind of anti– what I would call anti-drone legislation passed, it’s going to take massive lobbying, citizens protests. So I don’t think you’re going to see much of it, no.

I think most people that I talk to don’t even know what a drone is. We’re not educated. It’s moving – the thing that I’m trying to tell people, this is moving so fast that it would be good to slow it down a bit and you know, again, the President of the United States signed a law into effect allowing drones to start flying over America by 2015 without any protections, civil liberties protections, in the legislation at all.

So there’s no, nothing protecting the American public. In fact, I’m arguing for a new Bill of Rights basically. Because the Fourth Amendment, which would usually be involved with police, says that if the police have some reasonable suspicion, and it’s not an emergency, that you’re doing something illegal, they need to get a warrant. Well with drones, warrants go out the window. Because they’re going to be flying over your house. And if they do have scanning abilities, and they will eventually have that, they’ll be able to see what you’re doing in your home. Should they be able to use that against you, let’s say two years later? I would say no.

So what we’re seeing with the technology is they’re bypassing the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, the Fourth Amendment. And that’s why drones are something that, they’re so totally new, and I think they’re going to be awesome in their capabilities, that if we don’t get some kind of protection, I would say freedom as we have known it will be gone in another 15-20 years.

Scott Horton: Yeah. Well –

John Whitehead: Privacy. Privacy. Listen, I don’t how many people have gone through airport scanners, but they’re pretty intimate. If they can see you in your home having sex with your wife or whatever, we’ve reached an end point. And they can do that. They will be able to do that. Facial rec– they’ve already announced that they have facial recognition software, which drones will have, so they’ll be able to fly over a crowd, record everybody, know where you’ve been, whether you’ve gone to see a psychiatrist, if you’re walking in an office, they’re going to be watching all these things. So –

Scott Horton: Well, you know, here’s my thing about all this –

John Whitehead: But I go back again. The real issue I think here that I see is kind of – what human dignity’s all about is we have some private moments in our lives. But, you know, as people like Orwell wrote about, otherwise if you don’t have privacy, you’re not really a human being anymore. You’re just a part of the government, a part of the society, and you’re just a cog in the machine.

Scott Horton: Right. Yeah.

John Whitehead: That’s all you are.

Scott Horton: Can’t even keep your secret journal without them knowing, right?

John Whitehead: If you can have a secret journal these days, I’m not sure about that. Especially, if you do it electronically, there’s no secrets anymore, because you know the National Security Agency now downloads 1.6 million pieces of information every day, puts it in files off the Internet. So privacy is the issue.

Scott Horton: All right, so the thing here is, like, why don’t they, John – why don’t the cops have Cobra and Apache helicopters and kill us with Hellfire missiles? Because they’ve had that technology for a long time. And, Lord knows, the cops love killing people. I mean, to have a Facebook feed is to see cops killing innocent people all day every day in America.

[crosstalk]

John Whitehead: I know good cops, but, uh, the thing is –

Scott Horton: Usually they don’t make the national news other than the Internet.

John Whitehead: The problem, you see, is –

Scott Horton: It’s the law. Wait. Hang on one second, now, because it was a rhetorical kind of thing. It’s the law. It’s the old law from back when there was such a thing as the Constitution or any semblance of the American people caring about it that doesn’t allow local cops to kill people with Apache helicopters. But that’s the whole thing is, without that old law, they can and they will. In fact, when the law’s been eroded away, we’ve seen where they use tanks against us all the time.

John Whitehead: Oh, sure.

Scott Horton: They haven’t gone as far as Cobra helicopters yet, but the point being that if they can fly a full-scale drone war over Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia all day long, then they can sure as hell do it in our towns.

John Whitehead: They sure can. Here’s the thing, though. [crosstalk]

Scott Horton: And only our Bill of Rights, and only the American people being just demented in their jealousy over keeping it, it can protect us at this point. Otherwise, it’s just on. Because the technology, as you said, it’s so supersophisticated, it’s coming so fast, it can’t be uninvented. It can’t be undone.

John Whitehead: No, it can’t be undone.

Scott Horton: Only the old law can stop them.

John Whitehead: Yeah, I think the key here is that the older forms of oppression, which – if you want to call it that, hitting people over the head – with drones you won’t need that anymore because you’re going to have weapons of compliance. You’re going to have tasers, things that will not kill people but it will cripple people. It will put them out of business. It doesn’t get as much bad press as, say, shooting somebody with a gun. It’s going to change.

In other words, you’re going to see technology doing – there’s not going to be a human face behind it. So you can’t run up and say that, “That guy should be fired,” because it’s going to be a machine doing it.

Again, if you go on YouTube, they actually have a creature now that walks on four legs. They call it a drone. It can come to your front door now and knock, and it’s a police kind of vehicle – animal, it looks like a bear – and it can arrest you now. It can taser you.

Weapons of compliance, I think, like tasers, sound cannons, the things we’re starting to see used here in America, which were tested overseas first, by the way, in Afghanistan and Iraq, are being used here by the local police. It was tested militarily, now by the police here.

You won’t get the same kind of outrage, I don’t think, as just watching – the Rodney King – if you remember the Rodney King thing where they beat him up and you saw the footage. You won’t see any of that. You’ll sure see someone tasered, that’s it. By a drone.

Scott Horton: Right. Yeah, you know I saw a thing, John, one time, years and years ago, must have been 1996 or something. It was just really the dawn of the less than lethal police type technology, and it was on the Discovery Channel or something. And it was unique in that they really showed intelligent people saying intelligent things about, what does this mean for the future when you don’t have Kent State massacres that shock the conscience of the whole country. [crosstalk]

John Whitehead: Bad public relations –

Scott Horton: You just have a bunch of people blasted with a sound cannon until they go home. And so nobody, the sympathy for the protester that, you know, was engendered on the part of the regular people being awakened to what’s going on here, “Stop, what’s that sound” and all that, that’s all deadened now. And the same protest can be contained without escalating it to the point that you create new protesters. That kind of thing. And how they can come in and, you know, do small EMP bombs when they do a SWAT raid, turn out your lights first, and how they’re working on the science of making SWAT raids so efficient that no one could ever even have a chance to resist them like a Davidian ever again. And how just – man, they’re damn good at it. They’ve had so much practice this whole time now.

John Whitehead: Yeah, and the FBI is very good at – now when they’re expecting big protests they sweep in the cities, any peace activist they move into their homes, they go through their trash under new FBI rules. Plus, like the weapons of compliance, they’ve developed a new taser shotgun which you can shoot at a long distance and knock somebody down and semi-electrocute them. And then now they’ve developed a new, what they’re calling I think paintball pepperspray bullets that they can shoot from a long distance. So all these, these are weapons of compliance. There won’t be a human face. There won’t be anybody to blame. So the public relations debacle will be occasional, but you don’t have a policeman this time to blame. Not with the technology, no.

[crosstalk]

Scott Horton: Yeah. And not that anybody wants to see –

John Whitehead: So I don’t – If people say what’s the future look like –

Scott Horton: – anybody shot at Kent State either, but.

John Whitehead: The future doesn’t look real rosy. When you have a president sign a bill into law allowing drones to fly over America by 2015 but puts no protections in for the Constitution, and he taught the Constitution, is a little troublesome.

Scott Horton: Yeah. Well, you know, here in Austin, Texas, I believe, as far as we know, anyway – as far as I know – it was the first time the police used a drone on an actual raid, and it was a drug raid, I believe, and what they said was, “Well, the guy lives on a hill. And so what we are supposed to do? Not use a drone?” So, I mean, that’s it. That’s heralding the whole thing. That’s like the entire world changed to me, like that day Hezbollah flew a drone over Israel. Like, yeah? We just turned the page of history, I think.

John Whitehead: Well you know the United Nations has condemned tasers as torture, but Americans have gotten used to it. With the Occupy people – I mean you had 80-year-old women getting pepper sprayed and tasered. And that was okay. People – as long as Americans put up with this stuff, and they are, you’re going to get it. It’s just going to get worse. I mean, think about Martin Luther King. What would have happened to Martin Luther King on some of his marches when they only had attack dogs, if they had drones, tasers, pepper spray, sound cannons today – [crosstalk]

Scott Horton: Retinal recognition.

John Whitehead: – they probably would have dispersed it.

Scott Horton: Yeah.

John Whitehead: They would have dispersed it. I mean, what do you do when a sound cannon’s breaking your eardrums? If you don’t get away from it, you’ll go deaf. L-R-A-D, they call it LRADs. I have a new book, by the way, coming out in April which goes through all these weapons. There are so many.

Scott Horton: You know, I know a guy, John, who, he went out to protest when, about, it was the same time as Kent State in a different place, about when it came out about the secret bombing of Cambodia.

John Whitehead: Yeah.

Scott Horton: And at the protest, a bunch of guys in suits with mirror sunglasses came out and started taking pictures of everybody. And this was the first and last protest that this friend of mine ever went to, because, you know, hey, he had other priorities in life than being followed around by the DoD or whoever these goons were, and so that was just it. He was immediately chilled that quickly. At this point, hey, the cameras are already up on the street corners everywhere and whatever. He wouldn’t have even showed up in the first place.

[crosstalk]

John Whitehead: Oh, yeah.

Scott Horton: He wouldn’t have been surprised by a camera at all. He would have just taken it for granted.

John Whitehead: I live in a small town near Charlottesville,Virginia. There’s surveillance cameras everywhere.

But here’s another thing you have to look into this. There is a drone caucus in our Congress. I mean, they’re basically controlled by the large corporations that are making money off of this. And, again, I’ve written on this on our website, rutherford.org, you should read it, but what we’re facing here I think with the drone thing is the corporate state. It’s a fusion of the corporations. The corporations are making a lot – Boeing, the large aircraft industries, are making a lot of money off of the drones, and their bottom line is money, but when the state gets involved, their bottom line should be civil liberties and the Constitution, but that’s all getting overwritten right now.

Scott Horton: Right. And of course – [crosstalk]

John Whitehead: And I don’t want to – you know, I don’t want people to get pessimistic, and I’m not pessimistic, but it would be great to see Americans get educated on this subject, to speak out on it, to go to their state legislatures and say, “Hey, are you going to protect us against these things?” But people are caught up in what, politics now, or the next celebrity thing on television, and the drones are coming. I mean, they’re only a couple years away from being all over the sky.

Scott Horton: Well, and it’ll be the same economic model as with all the military equipment, the M16s and M4 machine guns and the tanks and everything that all the police get in America already. They funnel it through the DoD, right?

John Whitehead: Yeah.

Scott Horton: That way you don’t have a bunch of messy democratic process about whether the state governments are going to buy it. You have the Pentagon buy all the weapons from those big contractors that you named, and then the Pentagon passes them out to the cities for almost free, or maybe even for free, to them, and so – [crosstalk]

John Whitehead: Yeah, the fellow that [studied with?] me this summer –

Scott Horton: I mean, if you were a Raytheon lobbyist, that would be the model that you would pursue, right?

John Whitehead: Yeah, the drone guy that came by this summer, he just went out in his car and said, “Here, here’s my drones.” He pulled them out, he folded them out. They were the size of a large bird. And he put them up in the air and he showed me his little video camera on the ground and it was looking me right in the face. So they’re going to be everywhere. I think the thing is, a lot of private entities, larger corporations, smaller corporations, are going to be using drones too. So they’re going to be everywhere. So get ready for it, okay? That’s all I’m saying.

Scott Horton: Well, there’s going to be people, you know, vigilantes, arming their own drones and fighting dogfights up there too, you know?

John Whitehead: Yeah, and that’s a problem, because they crash. And when they crash they’re going to make some bad medicine on the ground. They’re – I actually have talked to some drone people who think they can hack into basic drone technology the government will have. What will happen, I don’t know.

But again, we’re not protected. No one’s protecting us here. That’s why we need some kind of civil liberties laws, and I think – another thing that most people don’t know, 24 universities right now are moving forward to giving degrees in drone technology. And that’s all supported by corporate money. So, you’re going to have universities across the country creating drone people to put more drones in the air, so.

Scott Horton: Well, this is what [crosstalk] Chalmers Johnson meant when he said –

John Whitehead: And this is not a small thing. I keep telling your listeners –

Scott Horton: – you either give up your empire or –

John Whitehead: – this is not small.

Scott Horton: – you live under it. You know? You order your entire society around making weapons of enslavement for Fallujans, guess what, then your neighborhood ends up looking a lot like theirs before too long, you know?

John Whitehead: Yeah, and the thing is, there are going to be some mistakes, there are going to be people who are going to be shot, tasered. The message I think we’re getting sent is if you want to exercise your First Amendment rights, stay home. It’d be better to stay home or you’re going to get harassed. Again, the police can back off now and not look like bad guys.

Scott Horton: Hey, John, let me ask you about this court decision. I think – I don’t think it was the Supreme Court but a federal appeals court or something that ruled about, it’s perfectly okay for cops to plant hidden secret cameras on private property – how much is the change in that compared to the previous precedent?

John Whitehead: Well, let me tell you in general what I’m seeing with the courts. I mean, at the Rutherford Institute, we’ve got many, many court cases going on. What I’m finding is, most of the judges out there are very pro surveillance generally. Whether it’s the TSA scanners or whatever. So, the courts, I used to think of them as courts of justice. They’re more like courts of order now. Even our present Supreme Court is very pro governmental bodies.

It’s going to be very difficult – again, you know, if groups like the ACLU would work with us and others, I think we could make some headway, but it’s going to be very, very difficult getting through the courts. The courts are going to be very pro-surveillance now. ‘Cause there’s this fear of the terrorist out there, all five of them running around the country. If there are five of them.

Scott Horton: Right. Yeah, in North America? Please. (laughs)

John Whitehead: I mean, I’ve talked to a few security people in Washington D.C. and I’ve asked them, “How many credible terrorists do you think there are in America,” and they hold up one hand, maybe five. These are NSA people.

Scott Horton: What, you mean outside of the U.S. government? Okay, yeah, then.

John Whitehead: No, inside. Inside the country.

Scott Horton: (laughs) (inaudible)

John Whitehead: They don’t think there are many – no, the terrorist thing is a good thing to use to sell drone technology, lasers, rubber bullets, pepper spray, whatever they want to do, or go arrest Brandon Raub for Facebook posts because he could be a terrorist because he thinks the government faked 9/11. He’s a terrorist. So “terrorist” is loosely defined these days.

Scott Horton: Yeah. [crosstalk, inaudible]

John Whitehead: So everybody’s a terrorist if you disagree with the government.

Scott Horton: Anyone the government doesn’t like. It’s like an anti– [crosstalk, inaudible] anybody the Israel lobby doesn’t like.

John Whitehead: [inaudible] anyone it doesn’t like, they can put you out of business. People ask me about my home life. I’m very dull. (laughs) I go home and do what I do. But I think more people are going to get like that. But, again I go back, that what they’re doing is they’re trying to discourage people from getting active, out in the streets, protest. That’s why you have all these weapons of compliance – tasers, rubber bullets, pepper spray, and they’re developing the technology at such a rapid rate they’re going to be able to do many things long distance. And with the drones they’re going to be on top of us. That’s all coming, folks. [crosstalk] If you believe it or not.

Scott Horton: All right. Well, hey, listen. [crosstalk] I don’t ever [inaudible] do, but –

John Whitehead: It’s like a sci-fi movie, by the way.

Scott Horton: John, I really appreciate the fact that you’re coming up with this model legislation and maybe people can participate in this. I mean, after all, if you’re going to have influence you’re much more likely – I mean a regular person in the audience – if you’re going to have influence, you’re much more likely to have it at the state level than the federal level anyway, so –

[crosstalk]

John Whitehead: I agree. I tell people –

Scott Horton: – why not ask your state house and senate members about this, and, you know, ask them, “Hey, we’re really talking about how you are going to live your life too here. You know, this is important.”

John Whitehead: And your children’s lives. You got grandkids, you know, your own children. I tell people to act locally, think nationally. Act locally. Because even our hometown here, we’re going to pester our local government to pass some anti-drone legislation, or controlling drone legislation, let’s put it that way. So you could get your local government – you can go on our website and pull the legislation down. It’s solid stuff. You can use it. Just go to your local city council and say, “Hey, this is something you need to look at. Pass it. Protect us. That’s your job.”

Scott Horton: Right. Well, you know, I’m not usually much in favor of seeking political solutions to any of these kinds of things. However, I guess it takes all kinds and all different ways of confronting these issues, and, really, what’s the good of convincing everybody to oppose these things if nobody’s going to do a thing about it? You might as well try to get a law passed, you know?

John Whitehead: I agree. I mean, Martin Luther King got the civil rights law passed, something we use in every lawsuit here, basically. So some legislation is very protective. This drone stuff would slow them down for a while. I don’t think anything can slow down the drone technology. It’s moving too fast, and the government – I mean, the government has bought into it already. It’s a law. 2015, they’re going to be everywhere. There’s like 130 police, I think, the last I looked, agencies that already have licenses to use drones, and they’ve used them already. There were some spotted in Chicago at the last big protest there a couple months ago.

So, they’re already here, folks. The question is, should we be protected from them? I think we should, yeah. So we need good civil liberties legislation. They shouldn’t be using anything against us in a court of law because there’s no – the police have no business watching what we do in our homes, or watching me walk down the street with my wife at nighttime. It’s nobody’s business where I’m going, what I’m doing.

Scott Horton: Yeah, well –

John Whitehead: So that’s the issue.

Scott Horton: I’m sorry to end the interview this way, but I’m pessimistic. I’m using my awesome Cassandra powers here, and we are doomed. There is no way the American people care at all. You know, they put cameras up on every corner in every town in America. And, you know, in Austin, it was not a surprise, or it wasn’t even hidden at all. The first thing they did was they got cameras up on every entrance to town by road, all of them, first, the perimeter of the city. And then they filled in the gap. And they did it in every town in America. There was never a referendum anywhere, ever. They never asked anyone, anywhere, ever. They just said, “You know what? We, the 18,000 governments of America, are putting cameras up wherever we feel like, and you’re not going to do a damn thing about it,” and the American people all rolled right over. And that was it!

John Whitehead: Yeah.

Scott Horton: There never even was a discussion. There still hasn’t been a discussion about it.

John Whitehead: Well, it’s Edward R. Murrow’s great statement, “A nation of sheep begets a government of wolves.” We’re sheep. So you’re going to have wolves.

Scott Horton: There you go. All right, well, listen. I appreciate that you’re fighting. I think this is a great idea, if only just to get people’s attention that, you know, the way it’s supposed to work anyway is that you’re free and these people are your servants (laughs), that kind of thing.

John Whitehead: Yeah. We don’t – and I feel we’re moving into what I call a slavery mode where they assume we’re just slaves and we’re all going to go along with whatever they do to protect us. But the question is, who’s going to protect us from the protectors? That’s the question.

Scott Horton: All right. Well I guess this is the Rutherford Institute’s what we got. Thanks very much for your time. I appreciate it, John.

John Whitehead: Hey, thank you, sir. God bless.

Scott Horton: All right, everybody, that’s John Whitehead from the Rutherford Institute. That’s rutherford.org. And they’re working on model legislation for your state’s government to at least somewhat protect us from the oncoming generation of domestic drones.

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Eric Margolis, journalist and author of American Raj, discusses why the US and France are so interested in Mali, of all places; the North African al-Qaeda affiliate borne from the brutal Algerian war; how Africa’s vast size and numerous conflicts give the Pentagon an excuse to stay “globally engaged;” the questionable US alliances with shady militants in Libya and Syria; the CIA’s love-hate relationship with Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad; and why puppet governments aren’t as easy to install as they used to be.

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