06/12/14 – Mitchell Prothero – The Scott Horton Show

The military-industrial complex, the disastrous rise of misplaced power...
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America's always gone to war a lot, though in older times it would disarm for a bit between each one.
But in World War II, the U.S. built a military and intelligence apparatus so large, it ended up reducing the former constitutional government to an almost ceremonial role, and converting our economy into an engine of destruction.
In The War State, Michael Swanson does a great job telling the sordid history of the rise of this national security state, relying on important first-hand source material, but writing for you and me.
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The War State, by Michael Swanson.
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We should take nothing for granted.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest today is Mitchell Prothero.
He's a reporter for McClatchy Newspapers.
McClatchyDC.com.
I think now in Turkey, but reporting on Lebanon, Syria, etc.
The sham, as some call it, I guess.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Mitchell?
I'm doing pretty good today.
How's our sound levels doing?
You sound just fine.
Okay, great.
Yeah, yeah, good times.
Appreciate you joining us here today.
Bad times.
You have so much news to report here.
Let me just stand out of your way.
You give us the rundown, and then it may not be until the second segment that I get to start with my follow-up questions.
There's so much going on with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Yeah, it's really been a remarkable week on that front.
I mean, going into this week, we knew that they were a powerful group controlling a big chunk of eastern Syria, limited for the most part around eastern Aleppo and Raqqa, and that they've been conducting operations, you know, in various incarnations for the last 10 years in Iraq.
What nobody really saw coming was a massive conventional attack on Iraq's second-largest city that was, I guess, so intimidating that the Iraqi army and police just threw down their guns and ran.
So essentially they've driven to within about 60 miles of Baghdad now.
You could safely say the Iraqi state is in disarray, if not on the verge of complete collapse.
And at this stage we're seeing militias step in from both the Kurdish side and from the Shia militias that at times battled the United States off and on throughout the U.S. occupation, are stepping in to essentially stop them from reaching the capital.
It's a very fluid situation, and it's incredibly difficult to get your head around.
All right, so now one big difference between a town like Mosul and Iraq is that Iraq is now a super-duper majority Shiite city because of the American war there.
And so I guess the question is not so much whether they could really take Baghdad, but whether they could take the army that's protecting Baghdad, whether the Iraqi army has the wherewithal to stand up to them even back in Baghdad, much less way out on the frontier, so-called, out in Mosul, right?
Well, it's even gotten so much closer at this stage that you could argue that within 60 miles of the Baghdad city limits is where we're seeing some clashes now.
So where's that?
That's like Abu Ghraib neighborhood, right?
Well, that's in that direction.
They've been in Abu Ghraib, actually.
That's to the west.
A little bit of history here.
One, earlier this year there was an uprising in the Anbar province, Fallujah and Ramadi, which may be familiar historically to your listeners just because the U.S. fought some terrible insurgencies there against a lot of the very same guys we're seeing rising up against the Iraqi government.
Those cities essentially fell as a result of the fighting that was going on in Syria.
Parts of them are still slightly under the control of the central government, government buildings sort of in the center of town, but the countryside and huge swaths, and we're talking millions of people, have more or less been under what we call the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or I'm just starting to call the Islamic State because they're practically a country at this stage, as well as tribes that have been irritated by the Shia government in Baghdad.
You're right when you say that the Shia had essentially taken over Iraq after the United States' invasion and occupation, in part just because there were more or less fair elections, and Shia composed about 60 percent of the population of Iraq, with about 20 percent Kurds and 20 percent Sunnis, or Sunni Arabs.
So what had happened was they fought a nasty sectarian war for control of Baghdad between about late 2005, early 2006, and 2008 that the Shia more or less won.
They drove huge amounts of Sunnis out of their neighborhoods, pushed them sort of into the western side of the city, and at that point you saw a lot of the violence in Iraq calm down simply because the Shia were firmly in command.
They kept rolling with that and had essentially taken over the country, and since the U.S. left in 2010, there hadn't been any real motivation on the part of Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, and the Shia to share any kind of power.
And so they were taking revenge for both sort of the oppression that had happened under Saddam.
They were rewarding their followers through patronage and jobs in the ministries.
Finally, we're in charge of the money here.
We're going to make sure our people who had been oppressed and sort of shoved aside for 40-odd years, make sure they get paid here, and also a little revenge for the civil war that they essentially fought with the U.S. as a referee.
Well, the Sunnis are not happy about this, and the minute that the Islamic State guys who are what we're calling a proto-Islamic caliphate, they're really even, as some might say, a little crazier than al-Qaeda.
They've been kicked out of al-Qaeda for brutality and for trying to bring an Islamic state at a time when virtually even the al-Qaeda guys thinks it's inappropriate.
And they've just gone on their own.
They're their own thing now, and once they attacked Mosul, what we're seeing more and more of is that the Sunnis, who've been so marginalized over the last four to ten years, have risen up along with them.
So even guys who wouldn't ordinarily subscribe to an al-Qaeda ideology are taking up arms to fight against the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad.
You are right, though.
So I think it would be a stretch to think that this offensive could take a city of 8 million people that's had five days to prepare.
The supply lines are a lot longer.
But just about everything north of it right now is in flux except for the Kurdish areas.
The Kurds have a very professional security force.
They're U.S.-trained.
They're very, very well-motivated and have a tendency to, as we used to joke, which makes them elite troops on some level in Iraq.
And those guys don't screw around.
They've already pushed out, so we haven't seen ISIS or the Sunni uprising willing to really face off with the Kurds at all.
They've been concentrating on pushing south towards Baghdad and grabbing as much of that Sunni triangle as possible to connect with what they've already got in Fallujah and Ramadi, which is starting to look like, I don't know, a third of the country.
Right.
Yeah, well, there's so much to go back over here.
But on that note, it's been, I don't know, five or six weeks now since the State Department report came out, and I interviewed your colleague Jonathan Landay, who is a very sober guy.
I mean, I've been speaking with him for years, and he's a very sober-minded guy.
And he was saying, look, it's not a proto-state.
It is a state, okay?
It's a country now.
It's not a lawless, Wild West, you know, would-be-jihadistan.
It is jihadistan.
It is a country now.
Landay's 100% right on that.
It's something that I've been pushing now because we've been trying to explain what ISIS is throughout all of my coverage of Syria.
And what we said was, first, they were al-Qaeda-affiliated and inspired, and then they were sort of a rogue al-Qaeda offshoot.
But now we just got to call it the Islamic State.
That's what they are.
They took the central bank in Mosul.
Nobody really wants to tell us exactly how much money was in that bank, but one estimate I've seen is 400 million U.S. in Iraqi currency plus unknown amounts of foreign reserves and gold bullion.
So whatever the number is, I think it's safe to say at this stage they've got more Iraqi money than they can ever really realistically spend, certainly enough to pay all the civil servants in Mosul for, I don't know, the next year or longer.
And they're by far, I mean, even if the lowest estimates that I've heard rumors of, because I don't want to commit to a number because we're not reporting that, I don't really know.
But I can't imagine even the lowest estimate wouldn't make them the best-funded non-state actor in the world.
And at some point you've got to make them a state actor.
I mean, they control oil fields.
They have taken a power plant.
In fact, I'm surprised they haven't done it yet.
I think they're afraid of damaging the equipment.
But they're about to take over the largest oil refinery in Iraq.
They run their own courts.
They have their own police.
I don't think it's anything that your listeners would be in a huge hurry to immigrate to.
But it's definitely at this point the formation of what we're calling a nascent proto-Islamic caliphate.
Yeah, I mean, it really is.
It's not just that they have the authority to keep Assad's troops out or something like that.
They're providing the water and the electricity and the local dispute resolution systems, like you're talking about, the local court systems, this kind of thing.
They really are building a country here.
They're doing a lot of it.
And they're being sort of rewarded right now by the people.
Right.
I'm sorry.
I've got to go out to this break, Mitchell.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Mitchell Prothero from McClatchy Newspapers with some answers about the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Mitchell Prothero writing for McClatchyDC.com.
Thank you very much, Mitchell, for holding through the break there and staying on with us.
As you know, you're one of the few who's covering this kind of thing.
Well, I mean, maybe now it's the big story of the week.
But up until now, you're one of the few paying very close attention to this.
So I really appreciate your journalism and your time on the show.
And now I'm going to say some things that I take responsibility for any errors.
I'll ask for your correction.
But I want to give credit to your colleague, or at least former colleague, David Enders, to Patrick Coburn and others for who I believe I'm paraphrasing.
During the Iraq War, the Sunni-based insurgency was really the entire Sunni community of Iraq.
They had everything to lose by losing Baghdad and losing the control of the government.
They had former Ba'athists, Sunni imams, and tribal leaders, family, elders, and these kinds of people.
They controlled the insurgency.
Al-Qaeda was about 2% or 3% Zarqawi's group.
And they were useful, and actually not really, but they were thought to be useful for a time.
They were probably more harm than good for the Sunni insurgency.
And they eventually cut their losses and attacked them and marginalized them and kept them down for quite a while and even gave Petraeus a little breathing room to declare a victory and go ahead and get out of there.
Whereas in Syria, this has really always been their war.
This is not the Sunni-based insurgency.
At least substantial proportions of the Sunni majority, and they're the 70% majority in Syria, unlike the 20% minority in Iraq, as you said.
But still, substantial proportions of Sunnis in Syria seem to prefer Assad or at least to sit this thing out.
And it's not so much just a clear sectarian split in the war there.
It's much more just al-Nusra and ISIS's war.
And the so-called moderates are widely rumored but seldom touched or seen.
It seems like all the support goes to these very same extremists we call them, al-Qaeda, the bad guys in Iraq, but they're the rebels in Syria.
And so now that we see, and there's obviously a few different places you could go with this discussion too, but now we see ISIS coming in and walking right into Mosul like this.
I wonder if there's even enough indication to know yet or if you have an opinion on whether they have grown in such strength that it's no longer fair at all to say that they're marginal compared to the Sunni insurgency or the Sunni opposition to Maliki in Iraq compared to the old days the way it is in Syria.
In other words, if the tribal leaders of Mosul decided, okay, you guys are getting a little too big for your britches here, will they even be able to marginalize them as they did back in 06 and 07?
If you know what I mean.
Or are they really that powerful now that they could walk right into Fallujah tomorrow too and stay there?
Well, they've managed to hold Fallujah for six months as a coalition.
I'm sorry.
I should say one more thing about that too.
And I'm sorry because I ask really long questions sometimes.
It's not much of a question as much of my best understanding for you to correct.
But I seem to remember that they flew the black flag in Fallujah and some local tribal leaders told them, take that thing down and they took it down because it really was much more a tribal thing than an al-Qaeda thing.
But I don't know how to parse this stuff that much.
Well, one thing is, and we all got to get into the practice of we need to get away from the Qaeda thing at this stage because, like I said, these guys have transcended that stuff.
The joke is that they're not Qaeda.
They're actually worse, depending on your perspective.
Just to go back a couple of things that you said.
There was a free Syrian army.
There is still one.
They were very powerful in the early days of the Syrian revolution, and a lot of them got killed fighting pretty bravely to overthrow Assad.
And they did have a vision for a state that probably we would have all been a little more comfortable with than what's been happening.
But at a certain point, the Islamists did arrive and really marginalized them.
And a lot of the FSA guys turned out to be gangsters, turned out to be sort of in it for the money, and they basically fell apart.
But even today on the ground, my guess would be there's still more of those guys than there are Nusra and ISIS in Syria.
But they're just having a very difficult time.
The regime has been better armed.
Iran has flooded the zone with as much money, fuel, and weapons as the regime could ever need.
And with Hezbollah fighting on the side of the regime, they're about the most professional and effective military force in the Arab world.
They've just had a terrible time of it.
And then they got attacked from behind basically by ISIS.
So I do disparage them frequently as hotel revolutionaries, being somewhat incompetent.
But they really were important early on.
But we've seen like we did in Iraq.
We saw this insurgency transform into an Islamic one.
I would agree with all my colleagues about Iraq, and I was there during this time.
It did not start as something that you'd call particularly Islamic or Islamist, we should say, in nature.
I think most guys were Muslims.
But what they were was nationalists, the Ba'athists, a nation of people who for different motivations were furious that the U.S. was occupying.
But we did see it transform into something along the lines of ISIS.
And by 2006 and 2007, they were the most powerful insurgent group.
To a large extent, that's why the tribes ended up turning on them.
They got sick of being bossed around and told what to do by Yemenis and Saudis and these foreigners.
And when the tribes decided they had to go, they went fairly quickly because they were foreigners.
Even an incompetent Iraqi is going to be a better fighter than a competent Yemeni if you're in Iraq.
And so that's what we don't know yet.
We've definitely seen guys in this incarnation of this fight, replacing the Americans with the Shia government, who have joined who aren't otherwise prone to supporting al Qaeda's, or I should say the Islamic State's ideology, what we call Salafi jihadism.
But right now they're all working together.
A bunch of us who've been experienced enough in the region would expect that alliance to start to fall apart.
When that's going to happen, how that would happen, I don't exactly know, and I think it's probably early to think about that.
What we're really faced with now is the collapse of a central government in Iraq, the collapse of their security forces, and everybody reverting to the militias of 2006.
So what I think you're going to end up seeing is Iran backing militias, Asiya al-Khaq, Jaysh al-Mahdi.
I don't know if they're going to come back in the same form they were when the Americans fought them in the early days of the occupation.
The Badr Organization, I think the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is going to end up flooding operatives into Iraq if they're not already there in order to try to stop this thing before it gets to Baghdad.
But at this stage, I think that, like I said, the capital is not going to fall, but I do think you're going to see everything north of it balkanized into areas controlled by different parties.
And at that stage, it's kind of the end of the modern state of Iraq.
Well, you know, it sure seems to me like Ayman al-Zawahiri really blew it from a, you know, kind of, well, I was going to say public relations, but that's not really it.
Like the so-called chain of command, he had these ISIS and Nusra and everybody else had sworn their loyalty to him, and then he ordered ISIS out of Syria and into Iraq, and they said, well, what are you going to do?
Court-martial us from your basement in Pakistan, old man, or whatever, and they went ahead and did what they wanted anyway, and yet here you see that they're perfectly happy to go back and forth and go and fight in Iraq, and now look at these huge gains in Iraq, and they didn't do it because he said so, they did it because they wanted to.
He's a couple thousand miles to the east of there, and so he could still be the, you know, rhetorical and proverbial king of al-Qaeda, but he's just basically marginalized himself right out of business, it looks like.
Well, one, people are only going to follow you if you give them strong ideology and leadership or money and guns, and he's in a little bit of a difficult position because he's not very charismatic like bin Laden was, and he's running for his life, we assume, in Pakistan, so he's not in a position to drop $100 million on these guys to get him going, so why would you listen to somebody who didn't pay you?
Yeah, there's one silver lining in this, right?
It's bad times for Zawahiri, finally.
Yeah, he's had a rough run of it for a while now, but yeah, absolutely.
The biggest mistake I think in some ways that these guys made, the Qaeda guys, in terms of holding everything together, is that they forgot one of their own core principles when they ordered ISIS out of Syria, which is that they approached this whole thing as, and one of the ISIS slogans is no nationalism, no tribalism, only the caliphate.
And even if you ask bin Laden, Zawahiri, and these guys, they all believe this stuff too on some level, which is that there is no such thing as Syria, there is no such thing as Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey.
These are all parts of a broader Muslim state that got carved up by colonial Europeans in order to keep them down.
So in essence, the minute he told them to all go back to Iraq, he was recognizing a paradigm that they were supposed to be trying to overthrow in the first place.
And so the ISIS guy seized on that and just said, look, this guy's for political power, he's not for what we're fighting for, which is a state that does away with all of this silly stuff.
Because there shouldn't be a difference between Baghdad and Damascus, Palestine in their view, Al-Quds, Cairo, this is all the same country.
Alright, now is there any chance that you're just doing nothing and would love to do one more segment with us here, or do I need to let you go?
Oh man, now I can't even hear.
For some reason Skype doesn't work with the bumper music.
They conflict in the mixing board or something?
Let's type to each other during the break.
Mitchell Prothero, everybody, from McClatchy, D.C.
We may have him in the next segment, maybe not, I'm not sure yet.
We'll be right back, though.
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Alright, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And I've got Mitchell Prothero on the line.
He's an investigative journalist, a war reporter for McClatchy Newspapers, McClatchyDC.com.
Iraqi government asks U.S. to bomb Islamist fighters as 30,000 troops flee their posts.
Oh, my God.
Some answers about the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
No longer the name of a fruity little club, now literally the name of a place on the map.
They've even got bulldozers.
Unconfirmed pictures seem pretty confirmative to me.
They're bulldozing the dirt berm that demarcated the Sykes-Picot line between Iraq and Syria.
It's over.
The Islamofascist caliphate that always was just the Bush administration's fantasy is now coming to life in real life.
It's absolutely amazing.
So I guess there's so much stuff to talk about.
But back to the question of whether they're going to try to take Baghdad or not and how during the war the Americans helped the Shiites not just come to power in the election but really helped them with the sectarian cleansing, the Mahdi Army and the Bata Brigades of the sectarian cleansing of Baghdad and made it like an 85% Shiite city, something like that.
I remember talking with Patrick Coburn about some of the attacks in Baghdad a few months back or maybe a year or two ago or something about ISIS.
We were talking about how if it took the army and the Marines to give Baghdad to the Shiites and to whoop al-Qaeda and drive them out along with the rest of the Sunnis, then they have no hope of taking Baghdad back and they have to know that.
And Patrick Coburn said, well, you know, and he kind of confirmed this yesterday on the show as well, from their point of view, they're the super majority in the region.
They got Saudi money and it's the Shiite Arabs who ought to be on the defensive just by numbers.
And so they sure would like to have Baghdad back.
And so I just wonder whether you think, maybe it's a stupid question, it's just a speculative thing, but I wonder whether you think they really want now to try to restart the whole civil war for Baghdad again or whether they're going to continue to focus on Assad in Syria and consolidate the gains that they've made in the north and west of Iraq right now or what do you see for the future here?
Well, I mean, on some level, I mean, we can do what would be logical and tactical.
And you always have to keep in mind that this is the Islamic world's equivalent of a bunch of school shooters.
So they really might think God has told them it'll all be OK and they could make some very terrible tactical mistakes.
One would be trying to fight for Baghdad.
That's what I'm hoping.
I mean, no offense to the people of Baghdad, but I don't want them coming west.
Well, I mean, look, the fact is they're not coming in this direction.
The fact is I find it extremely unlikely that they would be capable of taking a city of 8 million people that for the most part doesn't want them.
Particularly when you factor in they've had time now to push up and reconstitute some of these militias that are actually quite experienced and very ruthless.
Jaysh Mehdi, you know, the Haque guys and, you know, debater organizations.
These guys are getting geared up and organized right now by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
We've got persistent reports that I can't confirm, but I'd be shocked if weren't true, that Qasem Soleimani, who's the head of the Quds Force for Iran, the guy that a lot of people consider having saved the Syrian regime last year, that he's in place right now directing all of this.
And like I said, I'd be shocked if he wasn't.
Yeah, and America is sending him some F-16s to help.
Well, that's the funny thing is at this stage, one, this type of thing makes very strange bedfellows.
I had Hezbollah guys telling me a year and a half ago, wait and see, Hezbollah, Iran, America, and Russia are all going to be fighting alongside each other against these crazy Qaeda guys.
And we all kind of snickered, and I still think that's unrealistic, but it's a lot less crazy now.
The simple fact is at this stage, American and Iranian strategic interests definitely coincide.
I don't see America getting particularly involved in this.
One, the Obama administration's made it perfectly clear that they don't really feel like there's a ton that they can do, which I think is a realistic view.
There's a tendency by conservatives, I think, to overstate America's influence and ability to do things.
And then I think that the left has a tendency to overstate America's ability to screw things up.
America really isn't that involved or important to any of these people right now.
We can dump more money and weapons into the field, but even if you notice, the statements that have come out of the administration are, this is your problem, guys.
We offered to leave a training force back in 2010.
You and Iran conspired to tell us to get the heck out.
And so I think you and Iran look like you're in pretty good shape to handle it, which probably is the smartest thing for American foreign policy to do.
I saw a quote earlier today from a guy, an analyst who covers jihadi groups who I respect a lot, who said, you know, if you think about it, how much influence did the Ottoman Empire have over Catholic and Protestant sectarian violence in Ireland?
Keeping that in mind, what do you think America could do to stop a Sunni-Shia civil war or war, sectarian war, if both are really intent on having one?
And frankly, I think both sides have had it with each other.
I think that this has been a long time coming.
I think that America screwed around trying to manipulate these tensions for their own gain and really didn't get anywhere with it and have sort of ducked out.
And at this stage, what you're seeing is you were sort of right when you said, you know, talking about Saudi, you see a lot of the Gulf states who are Sunnis extremely worried about Iran's influence.
Iran is the natural and historical superpower in that region with 77 million people.
And, you know, they're Shia, and they're kind of all having a reckoning right now that I'm not sure anybody involved really cares what America thinks.
The joke is if two groups of people want to kill each other and take each other's stuff, they're not really going to listen to outsiders.
You know, so right now I just don't know what the West could do.
I think that Turkey and Iran can get involved.
I think that they could probably help put this down fairly quickly if they really threw themselves in.
But from what I can tell, it's a regional problem.
It's a regional thing that's been coming down the pike for a very long time.
And the more the West stays out of it, I think the smarter it would be.
I mean, that's editorializing a little bit, but I just can't see what America could do right now short of dropping 100,000 guys in there who would just end up bogged down in another stupid occupation.
And nobody's even suggesting such a thing except maybe Senator John McCain.
Right.
Well, I sure agree with you about, you know, what's possible, what should be done and that kind of thing.
But, you know, if we go back to the numbers here and the actual kind of borders and social services and real estate being created here, it's just too good of a talking point for not just John McCain, but the whole right wing.
And I think actually that because of the kind of Israel influence policy, if I may try to put it politely, of being so hell-bent against Assad and supporting the rebels against Assad this whole time, I think the dissonance in the narrative has prevented the right wing who usually are of, you know, kind of one narrative attacking Obama for not doing enough in any given situation.
They're a little bit torn when they're saying he ought to be backing the rebels more in Syria and doing everything he can to help Maliki crush them in Iraq when they're the exact same guys.
But I think eventually the dissonance in that narrative is going to fall away and it's going to become too clear to everyone, even at the New America Foundation and wherever, that, you know what, morality aside, as far as what makes sense, we ought to be doing like George W. Bush and paying Assad to kill Al-Qaeda guys, not paying Al-Qaeda guys to kill Assad.
This makes no sense whatsoever.
And if there's really a jihadi state there, I don't know how, never mind Hillary or Jeb Bush, I don't know how Obama is going to be able to resist sending in at least fleets of drones, if not Marines, when the reckoning with the old narrative and the new come to, you know, sift out here.
You know what I mean?
I had dinner with a spooky sort of Defense Department official who works in the region about two months ago.
And I asked him that question.
I said, you know, what point do we see the drones in eastern Syria?
I mean, you got piles of these guys.
They're able to train and do whatever they want.
Assad certainly has no interest in taking on ISIS, and we haven't seen much interest by ISIS in taking on Assad.
They've been trying to build their own state and clearly had their eyes on Iraq the whole time.
He said there's a very motivated government looking to kill them.
We don't need to.
Well, hear, hear.
That's a great place to end it.
Thank you so much for your journalism and your time on the show, Mitchell.
I really appreciate it.
No problem at all.
Get in touch anytime.
Great, great.
That's Mitchell Prother at McClatchyDC.com.
Go and read that.
I mean it.
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So Mike's betting on commodities, mining stocks, European markets, and other hedges against a depreciating dollar.
Play along on paper or with real money and then be your own judge of Mike's investment strategies.
See what happens at WallStreetWindow.com.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
Like I told you before, the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF.org represents the best of the libertarian movement.
Written by the fearless Jacob Hornberger, FFF writers James Bovard, Sheldon Richman, Wendy McElroy, Anthony Gregory, and many more.
Write the op-eds and the books, host the events, and give the speeches that are changing our world for the better.
Help support the Future Freedom Foundation.
Subscribe to their magazine, The Future of Freedom.
Or to contribute, just look for the big red donate button at the top of FFF.org.
Peace and freedom.
Thank you.