03/11/14 – Jacob Hornberger – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest today is Jacob Hornberger.
He's the founder and the president of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Welcome back to the show, Jacob.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Nice to be back.
Always an honor, Scott.
All right, good times.
Very happy to have you here and happy to have the opportunity to thank you again for having me out to your conference within a conference at the International Students for Liberty back on February the 15th.
The video is at your YouTube channel and mine.
It's called John Glaser and Scott Horton, Libertarianism versus the Empire.
And I'm a little disjointed at the beginning because I just showed up at the hotel when it was time for my speech to be over.
But I think it turned out all right.
And so but anyway, I had a great time and I got to hang out with Bob Higgs and Sheldon Richmond and everybody, Gareth Porter and all that.
So it was really great.
And thank you again for having me out there, Jacob.
Oh, thanks for asking.
Your talk was absolutely awesome.
I mean, it was chaotic because, as you know, your flight got canceled and you had to come in at the last minute.
But it turned out to be fantastic.
I'm glad we got to fit in.
And on our website at fff.org, we now have all the videos posted for our conference within a conference.
And they're all just fantastic.
I mean, of course, the big one was the Oliver Stone panel.
And that, from what I understand, that the videos of that panel have received more than 17,000 views on YouTube.
Great.
But all the talk, your talk, Blazers, Stephen Kinzer, Jamil Jaffer, Jonathan Turley, they were just fantastic.
Sheldon Richmond and I did a Libertarian Angle.
So I invite everybody to go in there and go to fff.org and just attend the conference.
Even though it's over, you can still attend it by watching all these fantastic lectures.
Yeah, I really like Stephen Kinzer.
He's my favorite.
Oh, he's just absolutely awesome.
And his speech was just fantastic.
It was dynamic, enthusiastic, informative, principled.
It was just fantastic.
All right.
So now I got the idea and a friend emailed me to say that he thinks I'm right.
So I must be right.
That this news is not news.
This news is world history.
This is huge.
This is major.
This is sort of kind of like a 9-11, sort of a pivot point, a spot where you turn the page in your history book in a few decades from now.
I think this fight between the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA over the 6300 page Senate torture report, Intel Committee torture report on the CIA's torture program that the CIA has been fighting to keep classified and picking, I think, what's pretty obviously bogus fights over the details in order to try to keep it classified.
And now the lengths that they have gone to in spying on the Senate staff, as reported in McClatchy newspapers, and attempting to file criminal charges with the Department of Justice against the Senate staff for liberating of CIA, what's called the Panetta report, that actually corroborates the Senate's report rather than the CIA's objections to the Senate's report.
And Dianne Feinstein gave a speech this morning on the floor of the Senate where she said she took the filing or attempted filing or complaining, the lodging of an official complaint to the Department of Justice by the CIA as an attempt of intimidation against her and her staff and her committee.
She was not going to take it lying down.
And have you ever seen such a thing in your life?
Well, you know, I've been saying for a long time now that the national security state apparatus, which consists of the Pentagon, the staff military industrial complex, the military empire, the CIA and the NSA, have effectively become a fourth branch of government.
And it is the most powerful branch.
It is more powerful than the executive, the judicial, and the congressional branch.
And so here you have the CIA actually requiring the members of the Senate, the Senate staffers, to come over to CIA headquarters to look at files because the CIA said, we're not going to come over there with our files.
So, you know, like, who is serving in the subservient position?
It's clear to me that the Senate is serving the subservient position to this fourth branch of government.
And then what happens is some of these staffers find out the CIA has lied to Congress about all this torture.
And they apparently take out some of the documents showing that.
And the CIA discovers this by surreptitiously spying on the computer systems of Congress.
And, of course, you know, the congressmen are just blasé about this, nonchalant.
I mean, it's like they have accepted their subservient role until some of us started raising questions.
Connors Friedersdorf wrote a great piece on this.
Other people have written about it.
And finally, Dianne Feinstein, it's like a light bulb goes off in her head and says, oh my gosh, they're not supposed to do this.
And so she gives this little speech about how outraged she is that the CIA is spying on Congress and she wants this investigation.
But this deference to the CIA and the national security state on the part of Congress, it's gone on for a long time, Scott.
This is nothing new.
It's inconsistent with what the founders of this country had in mind, but it's certainly nothing new.
Yeah, you know, I think part of the thing, part of the problem that ails us is that there's so much secrecy surrounding it that, you know, we we find kind of, you know, shafts of light peeking through the darkness occasionally where, you know, even in the Washington Post, right, Dana Priest and William Arkin did that series that became a book about top secret America where they basically described the national security state and the military industrial complex and that whole web as, you know, doubling or tripling even since 9-11, right?
The growth from World War II to 9-11 was X.
And then since then, it's X times three, right?
And yet it's all in secrecy.
And so you really can get away with just waving a flag and make them believe that we have our three branches and the big white marble structures of D.C. that represent them.
And this whole top secret America is still kind of in the shadows.
And so we don't really have much of a grasp of how much has changed until then we see something like this where, wow, man, so the CIA really thinks they're big shots compared to the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, huh?
That's interesting, right?
Oh, it's fascinating.
But it is very revealing because it shows their mindset and it exposes the charade of what's going on for decades as a, quote, democratic system.
I mean, you've got what some people call the deep state or some people would call it the parallel state.
So you have what we see on the surface, you know, what we learn in the civics classes in high school and in college and so forth, where, oh, we have three branches of government and they, their separation of powers and they balance off against each other.
And this is to, you know, blah, blah, blah.
But underneath the surface, you have the deep state, the parallel state that is engaged in assassinations, unlimited power, torture, disappearances of people, supporting brutal dictators who are ambitious.
And none of us are permitted to know about that.
And as you point out, every so often, some of it leaks to the surface and everybody looks at it like, oh my gosh, put it underneath there, put it underneath.
And that's what the CIA is trying to do with this torture report.
You know, keep it secret.
The American people don't need to know about this.
Same with the NSA.
They had this super secret surveillance scheme that they don't want Americans to understand that the government's spying on them.
They want this little aura of what's on top of the surface of democracy and three branches of government when, in fact, you've got a totalitarian apparatus that is spying on people, that is torturing people, assassinating people, that is consistent with everything the Soviet Union, the communist regimes were consistent with.
And so it's, is it refreshing to see Dianne Feinstein say, hey, you're the servant, you serve us.
Yeah.
But I don't think anything's going to come of it.
Nobody's going to get arrested or indicted or punished.
We won't even learn the names of the CIA agents who did the spying.
You know, to me, it's just a 10 percent teapot.
But at least it does expose how powerful this branch of government has become.
Right.
And plus, it's just nice to see her mad, too.
Well, yeah, unless it's just fake indignation.
You never know about these people.
And you really don't even know how many assets the CIA has in Congress.
They're not required to report that.
We don't know whether they have assets there.
They have assets everywhere else within the press and so forth.
And so I'll be real interested to see what comes of this.
But my prediction is nothing's going to happen.
It's just a little tempest that's going to go right on over and it's going to be business as usual.
I think the other important aspect of this is the torture report.
Notice how the CIA wants to keep this thing super secret.
And part of the reason they might feel like there's some criminal liability.
I mean, look what's happening in South America where you have Democratic governments that are now putting and have been putting the torturers on trial under these military regimes.
Military regimes, by the way, that were partnering with with the CIA as part of what was called Operation Condor, that was an assassination torture program.
Well, no, no CIA officials have been brought to trial, even though their partners and their comrades in Latin America have been brought to trial and are now serving time.
And I think that has to be lurking in the back of the minds of the CIA, that they know that what they've done, torture, waterboarding and so forth, was illegal to the hilt.
And I think they would love to keep that as secret as possible to avoid even the potential of having people call for criminal prosecution for these things.
Right.
Well, and, you know, I think part of what must be scaring that, well, I mean, they know what's in there, but just the fact that it's 6000 pages, 6300 pages, it means the crowdsourcing of the Senate torture report once it does get out in PDF format where every blogger can, you know, every wannabe Marcy Wheeler can just have at those footnotes.
I mean, you're talking about years.
It's almost like the Snowden documents being released.
Right.
It opens up the entire torture subject and not just for the short term, but maybe, you know, for for a long time, for long enough, like you're saying, to build up enough pressure that somebody might actually get in trouble for murdering somebody.
Yeah.
And don't forget that, you know, the CIA, you know, this shows you how audacious they are, how arrogant they are, how powerful they are.
They had recorded all these torture sessions or many of the torture sessions videotaped them.
You know, how much fun is that videotaping these sessions so that you can apparently use these videotapes later on in torture class?
And then when it when it all was brought to the surface and Congress starts to investigate it, what do they do?
They destroy the videotapes knowing that this official investigation was going to be going on and they did it intentionally.
This wasn't like a routine destruction that we often hear them doing when there's an investigation pending.
This was a deliberate obstruction of an investigation to avoid having to to justify what they done with these videotapes.
Did anything happen to that guy?
Nothing.
No prosecution.
No indictment.
No, no, no, nothing.
Just, you know, not even a slap on the wrist.
Right.
Well, and it really goes to show that Barack Obama himself said, hey, we have to look forward, not back.
We will not have accountability under the law for Bush regime tortures.
That's as simple as that.
All right.
Now we got to take this break.
But when we get back, we'll have more with Jacob Hornberger on the Senate and the CIA torture and spying and the post-constitutional empire here on the Scott Horton Show, Liberty Express Radio.
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In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War Two.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
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All right, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Jacob Hornberger.
He's the founder and the president of the Future of Freedom Foundation at FFF.org.
Of course, Bovard, Richmond, Gregory, McElroy and a bunch of great writers there at FFF.org for you.
And so now we're talking about, well, torture, spying, the rule of law and the constitutional separations of powers and these kinds of things.
And one of the things I thought was mildly ironic, Jacob, in this speech by Dianne Feinstein is she cites, first of all, the part of the Constitution, which I forgot exactly what it's called, but the Protected Debate Clause, I think is what they call it, where it says I believe Article 1 or maybe it's in, I don't know which article it's in, but the Congress is protected from arrest for anything that they do on the Senate floor.
So like when Mike Gravel read the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record, tough luck, Richard Nixon, you can't do anything about it because the Constitution protects him from arrest for doing something like that.
And so she invoked that as part of the separation of powers doctrine being violated by the CIA here.
But then she also said, hey, and this violates the Fourth Amendment and it violates, this is Dianne Feinstein talking on the question of being spied on over the torture report.
It violates the Fourth Amendment and she even invoked Executive Order 12,333, not the part that supposedly authorizes the NSA to do all these horrible things, but the part that supposedly forbids the CIA from spying or operating on American soil in any way against Americans and how she ought to be protected against, you know, for those reasons, which, you know, I thought was hilarious.
And she's their number one accessory to the crime there when it comes to NSA spying on all the rest of us.
That's a great point, Scott.
I mean, it really demonstrates the hypocrisy of these people that, you know, she's all offended because the CIA is spying on her, but boy, she just doesn't bat an eyelash at the fact that the NSA, which is the sister organization in this national security state branch of the government, it's spying on all the rest of us.
And who knows that CIA could be spying on all of us too.
Nothing's going to happen to them if they do.
We all know that.
But yeah, I mean, you know, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
It's good to see her making the statement of outrage that you don't have the right to be spying on me and my staff and the members of Congress.
How about a little bit of consideration for the American people?
Because that's exactly how we feel.
And yeah, your point is well taken.
It really demonstrates the double standards and the hypocrisy of these people.
Well, what's funny is, I mean, you got to figure, and I don't mean to a man, every single one of them, but for the most part, if you're a senator, you got that way because you're pretty corrupt and made some pretty bad compromises and put your personal ambition before any kind of principle anywhere else.
How in the hell did you become a senator?
So pretty much all these guys are compromisable.
And then you got to remember now, we already know from the Snowden documents, we know that the NSA is spying on the Congress all the time because that was in the story in The Guardian, the Greenwald story in The Guardian that the New York Times never even mentioned and never made it to TV news here, but that they turn over their entire haul to Israel every day and that they have a deal with the Israelis that promise not to read anything in there about or listen or search any information that you have in there of our Congress people.
So they already know that they're turning over everything they have, including on the Congress to the Israelis, and then they're saying, oh, but please don't go digging through their corruption and their secrets.
We could see how that wouldn't serve anyone's interests, right?
Well, and that's another factor here.
I mean, that's the reason governments spy on people and spy on members of Congress.
That's what J. Edgar Hoover was famous for.
You get information, you get dirt on people, and then they're not going to oppose you.
And we cannot discount that possibility, given the fact that the NSA keeps track of everybody's phone calls.
If any member of Congress is having an extramarital affair and there's a bunch of phone calls to the person they're having the affair with, there's not any chance at all that that congressman's going to take on the NSA or the CIA and so forth.
And that's the whole benefit of this surveillance scheme.
That's why totalitarian regimes, communist regimes spy on their citizens, not just to see what they're up to, but to be able to use blackmail and extortion to make sure that they don't get in the opposition.
But like you're saying, too, it's the panopticon effect where they don't even try it because they don't know whether the NSA can prove they've been having an affair or not.
But who wants to take that risk if you know you're guilty of something, you know?
Oh, there's no question about it.
Once you know that you're doing something and they have evidence for that and you suspect it, you're not going to test them.
You're just going to not make any waves at all.
And so you can't help but wonder whether that's one of the big reasons why the members of Congress never make waves against the CIA and the NSA.
I mean, what's happening today is really remarkable.
And I can't help but believe that it's a result of pressure from some of us in the press that have been saying, why are you so silent about this?
You're an independent branch of government.
The CIA is supposedly just an agency.
And, well, we know it's not just an agency.
And so I think that it may be pressure.
I think we should also raise, though, Scott, what's different about us libertarians is that we're not interested in just reigning in the CIA or reigning in the NSA like a lot of these liberals are.
We're in, of course, the conservatives just want to expand the power.
We libertarians want to dismantle this whole national security state apparatus.
It was brought into existence.
It was justified by the so-called Cold War against America's World War II partner and ally.
Well, that Cold War ended in 89.
And that national security state apparatus should have been dismantled.
And instead, we kept it in existence.
We got all the terrorist attacks and the perpetual war on terrorism.
We now have this crisis against Russia as a direct result of what NATO's been doing to expand its power into Eastern Europe.
And now we have this torture scheme that's coming about.
Well, you know, it just goes on and on.
And I think it's now time for the American people to say, what is the role of government in our society?
And start talking about dismantling the fourth branch rather than performing it.
Yeah, well, that's what I'm saying.
And, you know, I'm more of a Richmondian on this where I want to go back to at least the Articles of Confederation or maybe, maybe not.
In fact, I kind of like that one because that just seems like maybe I could sell it in a million years that, hey, we can still be the USA, but without a general government in D.C. at all.
It's proven to be, you know, too much.
You give them an inch, they'll take a mile, you know?
Well, yeah, I mean, I could be very happy with the Articles of Confederation.
But absent that, I mean, it's not an either or thing.
You can dismantle agencies.
You can dismantle the DEA.
You can legalize drugs.
You can dismantle the welfare state and then see what's left, you know, and I think there would be a tremendous, well, I know there'd be a tremendous change in America if you could get rid of the warfare state apparatus of the government and the welfare state apparatus and the drug war apparatus without even returning to the Articles of Confederation.
Remember, these were things that our American ancestors for more than 100 years lived without.
And if they lived without it, they showed that it's possible to live without these apparatuses.
Cold War is over.
Get rid of this thing.
All it's doing is creating problems for us.
The newest problem is, you know, pledging the lives of American young people to defend Croatia, Turkey, Slovenia, Slovakia, Czech Republic.
How many people realize that their brothers and sisters, well, maybe their sisters, brothers, sons, fathers have been pledged to the defense of these countries?
Incredible.
Without even a congressional vote, without a treaty, it's incredible just by making them members of NATO.
Yeah, I mean, and that's all of our lives there, because when you're talking about Eastern Europe and NATO and possible conflict with Russia, that means the possibility of losing entire cities here back home in North America where we're not used to having to fight our wars, you know.
But by the way, I wanted to add something to what you're saying here about just how off course we are, because I think it's really hard sometimes for people to imagine a society where we don't have this massive military state, and they can't imagine, I mean, you think of all the hue and cry when they try to close one military base anywhere.
People can't imagine just, you know, cutting the cord.
But at that conference that you invited me to speak at on February the 15th there, whichever you can see the videos at FFF.org, I got to have breakfast with you and Bob Higgs and others, and I asked Robert Higgs, the great libertarian economist, all about this.
If I had the magical powers and I could just completely abolish the entire warfare state and all these people had to go get a real job tomorrow, how bad of a shock would it be?
What would happen?
And Higgs' attitude was, no problem.
You know what?
You abolish militarism, you stop distorting the economy into all this militarism, we'll all be rich.
And don't you worry one little bit about closing a base here or having some unemployed former infantrymen there.
It'll all work out in the price system in no time.
Oh, it would be the greatest economic revival immediately that one can ever imagine.
I mean, you know, you see these kind of phenomenons at the end of a war where some people say, oh, how can we discharge all these soldiers into the private sector?
They're going to go increase unemployment.
Well, the exact opposite happens.
It's a doubly positive effect because now the private sector isn't having to pay for the taxes that fund these people.
So they get to keep all that money in the private sector.
And now these nonproductive people are in the private sector producing wealth themselves.
So it's doubly positive.
And if you dismantle the entire draining force of the warfare state on America, it would be unbelievably fantastic.
There you go.
You see, everybody does not have to be this way.
Go to FFF.org and read Jacob Hornberger and his great stable of writers there and figure out how to put liberty first here for a change.
Thank you very much, Jacob.
I sure appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, everybody, FFF.org.
And please do check out the great videos of all the great speeches, including mine and John Glazer's there at the conference there back February the 15th.
That's their YouTube channel there as well.
Don't worry about things you can't control.
Isn't that what they always say?
But it's about impossible to avoid worrying about what's going on these days.
The government has used the war on guns, the war on drugs, and the war on terrorism to tear our Bill of Rights to shreds.
But you can fight back.
The Tenth Amendment Center has proven it, racking up major victories.
For example, when the U.S. government claimed authority in the NDAA to have the military kidnap and detain Americans without trial, the nullifiers got a law passed in California declaring the state's refusal to ever participate in any such thing.
Their latest project is OffNow.org, nullifying the National Security Agency.
They've already gotten model legislation introduced in California, Arizona, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas, meant to limit the power of the NSA to spy on Americans in those states.
We'd be fools to wait around for the U.S. Congress or courts to roll back, big brother.
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Go to OffNow.org, print out that model legislation, and get to work nullifying the NSA.
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