08/21/14 – John Whitehead – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, the Scott Horton Show.
Later on, John Mearsheimer is going to be on to talk about the situation in Ukraine, but first we go to John Whitehead from the Rutherford Institute.
His latest piece is called turning America into a war zone where we, the people are the enemy.
Welcome back to the show.
John, how are you doing?
Hey, thanks.
Pretty good.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here on the show.
And listen, I don't usually do this, but I'm particularly interested in your case and in the case of your institute here.
Could you give us a little bit of background before we get into, you know, your journalism here, what you're writing about, but your essay, but can you give us a little bit of your background and the background of your institute and, you know, politically speaking, where you come from and exactly what business you guys are in?
Because it's not just essays.
I see legal assistance and- Oh yeah, we're a civil liberties group.
We do the whole Bill of Rights, you know, police stuff, people arrested for ...
We had a big case in Washington, D.C. where these guys play guitars out on the street.
They were hassled and arrested.
We've defended.
We got a big case in Florida right now, well, it's an important case, where a lady named Nicole Ganey, her son went about a block or so down, played at a playground.
She was arrested.
She's facing a five-year prison sentence for child neglect.
It's an interesting case.
You can go to our website to read that.
We're defending her.
So you're a lawyer then?
Yeah, I'm a lawyer, constitutional lawyer, and I have ...
We have good lawyers all over the country that work with us.
They donate our time.
We're a nonprofit group.
When we take a case, we do it for free.
Politically speaking, I have no politics.
I haven't voted in 25 years.
I don't get involved in politics.
What I do is I sue politicians, but I don't get involved in politics, no.
Ah, well, that's a very important point.
First of all, I love anybody who sues politicians for just about any reason.
That's just great.
I see politicians as moving targets, essentially.
Right.
It's very interesting that you have that lawyerly ...
You could compare it, in a way, to soldiers' attitudes, at least, how it's supposed to be, and to at least some reporters, that they really try not to get too engaged in how things are supposed to be, and certainly as far as identifying with any political group or movement, but they're just more interested in facts and law.
No, I defend people.
I defend people.
I don't agree with anything they have to say.
I don't agree with anything they have to say, generally, but if they're on a street corner with a picket sign, they got me on their side.
Right.
Okay.
Well, see, so now I'm so glad that I asked, because you've helped inform my perspective there, and it makes me appreciate your writing that much more, I think, too.
So again, this article is called, Turning America into a War Zone, Where We the People Are the Enemy, and I guess my problem with that is that it's not hyperbole, is it?
Not really.
I've been writing on the militarized police for 10 years, and I'm glad people are starting to wake up to it, but I've been screaming about it.
My latest book, A Government of Wolves, the emerging American police that goes into most of these things we're seeing today, well, you saw how the police in camouflage outfits, sniper rifles, they don't look like local police that I used to see.
It's changed dramatically, I'd say, over the last 20 years.
The Department of Homeland Security now is in the thick of it.
They're handing out all this equipment from license plate readers to stingray devices which go in police cars, where they can drive through your neighborhood and download everything that you're doing electronically, to the helmets, the guns, the MRAPs, mine-resistant armor protection vehicles used in war zones, about 48-foot vehicles, 24 feet high.
You saw some cops sitting on those in the Ferguson, but that's the lay of the land right now.
We don't really have local police anymore.
Most of the police now work with all the federal agencies.
We have cases where people are arrested for anti-government Facebook posts.
It's the Department of Homeland Security Secret Service working with the local police.
They do these raids on them, take them to jail.
We're in a real precarious state.
I'm a freedom lover.
When I see this stuff, like I say, James Madison said, the fellow who wrote our Bill of Rights, take alarm.
It's the first experiment with liberties.
Well, we're past the first experiment, folks.
Yeah.
Well, and as long as we're talking founding fathers, these are the soldiers quartered among us.
I mean, what difference does it make if they're under the control of the Pentagon or the local sheriff's deputy if he thinks he's a general, you know?
Well, they're a standing army.
I mean, that's Washington, Madison, they all warned, do not let a standing army develop.
But we do have a standing army now, as you saw with some of these guys, how they were ordering, arresting journalists, ordering people into free speech zones.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm a constitutional lawyer.
America is a free speech zone.
I have a right to walk up to anybody in this country, a government official, and ask them a question.
If they point a gun at me and order me away, they just violated my constitutional rights.
Right.
Well, and that's the thing, too, we're not just talking about, you know, costumes and bigger rifles and the get up, the atmosphere.
They're breaking the law.
The old law.
80,000 SWAT team raids occurring across America, 80 percent of those are from your warrant service, where a cop used to knock on your door and hand you the warrant.
They're going through people's doors, but they get federal grants if it's a marijuana raid.
So that's one reason it's increasing.
They actually get paid for doing certain SWAT team raids.
So kids are getting shot and killed, dogs.
Again, I detail these stories in my book, A Gunman of Wolves.
It's a war zone.
I mean, that's what you see in Afghanistan.
Well, listen, I'm a former infantry officer.
I defend a lot of vets who get in trouble with the so-called government, but they tell me that a lot of these SWAT team raids we're seeing in America, they have to get permission from their superiors to do those kind of things in Afghanistan.
And they're surprised that these people are going through, that these SWAT team, they're going through people's doors in the middle of the night.
You saw the kid in Atlanta where they threw the flashbang grenade into the kid's crib, burned part of its face off.
What in the world is going through these people's heads?
Right.
And in fact, you know, when we read about the war in Afghanistan, the surge there and all of that, it was, you know, clear hole and build.
So the infantry is supposed to stand around and be officer friendly, the traffic cop or some nonsense.
But the rest of the war is being fought by the top tier special forces, Delta and SEALs kicking in people's doors in the middle of the night and doing these night raids and waxing anybody who resists them.
And this is what our sheriffs are doing, is what the top tier special forces are doing to the Afghans in the name of fighting the Taliban.
Well, a lot of your SWAT teams are trained by special forces types.
We're finding that out too.
So that's one reason you're saying, but the tactical equipment, the police training we see in, but here's a, I mean, it's a good point.
I want to make this.
I talked to a lot of policemen who hate this stuff.
I mean, they just, they support my institute, by the way, with checks.
I had one drive by about two weeks ago.
He wanted to talk to me, he had read my book and he said, I'm writing you a check.
And he wrote me, stood there in front of my receptionist and wrote me a nice size check.
He says, I want you to keep sounding the alarm out there.
But a lot of your older policemen especially don't like what's going on and good for them.
Right.
Yeah.
It's really enough.
I mean, I would have just taken it for granted that at least these guys know what their job is supposed to be.
But I'm starting to wonder whether anyone has ever told these cops that, hey, there is a difference between a cop and a soldier.
Minimum force versus overwhelming force and kill versus protect the rights even of the most criminal suspect and these kinds of differences.
Does anyone ever even teach them that stuff anymore?
Or is it just go out there and kill, kill, kill because blood makes the grass grow?
Well, what I'm being told by some to actually teaching the academies that the training is more militarized now, it's very aggressive.
That would change a lot of the, there's a couple of things we need to do.
And I talked to police who are trying to implement these changes and that is back off the military kind of training to the uniforms, wearing a Kevlar helmet, assault rifle, riding an assault vehicle.
But the psychology studies show that once they're in those uniforms and they get in those units, they act like combat units and the person they're facing who is an American citizen now looks like an enemy combatant to them.
And that's how it does change you psychologically.
And by the way, uh, there was a couple of recent studies that show that the, you know, that backed up these initial studies that were done years ago.
So that's where we're at.
You can change the training and the color of the uniforms, get rid of the camouflage and the black outfit.
You know, it's funny.
I see the pictures of these guys driving through Mayberry with, uh, you know, I saw a picture this morning of a bunch of guys in camouflage all hanging onto the outside of a big armored vehicle.
Uh, and the joke was, why are they wearing camouflage in the snow from this picture?
But the real joke was here.
They're driving through somebody's hometown anyway, here in our country, they're dressed up like that.
And all I could think was that they must be saying to each other, like if it was a cartoon, the caption would be, Hey Jimmy, isn't this absurd that we're dressed up like soldiers patrolling around our own neighborhoods where we're from, where there are no dangerous criminals for a hundred miles.
It's ridiculous, but no, they don't.
It's like you're saying they get, they rationalize and get right into it.
And I'm sorry.
There's the music playing.
We got to take this break.
We'll be right back with John Whitehead from the Rutherford Institute, a government of wolves is the book rutherford.org is the website.
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All right, y'all welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, the Scott Horton show.
I'm talking with John Whitehead from the Rutherford Institute, rutherford.org, and we're talking about the militarization of the police.
Seems like an important part of this, John, and this is, I think actually the last time I tried to get you on the show and it didn't work, it was to focus on the Department of Homeland Security and the fusion centers and all that, because it's the nationalization of the police that goes along hand in hand with the militarization here.
And I was wondering if you could elaborate on that a little bit, because that's a pretty big shift in the structure of American police power.
Well, the Department of Homeland Security is the one that now distributes all these things you're seeing the police have.
They're the one that hands them out to the police.
Department of Homeland Security, by the way, a little over a year ago purchased 1.6 billion hollow point bullets for use by their agents.
I guess I'm a former infantry officer.
You can't use those.
They violate international law.
But you have the Department of Fisheries now running around with hollow point bullets.
I wondered, are they going to be shooting fish?
Social Security Administration purchased 200,000 hollow point bullets, they said, in a press release to be distributed to 41 locations around the United States.
We've got American police officers running around with hollow point bullets and they explode on contact.
So the Department of Homeland Security, it's a monster, it's a mega monster of 240,000 full-time employees and a $61 billion budget.
They're the ones handing out the license plate readers, stingray devices, and all those things to local police.
So they basically coordinate what's happening out there.
And again, the cases we get involved where people have been arrested for Facebook posts, it's the Department of Homeland Security working with the local police.
So I'm wondering, in most localities, do you really have local police now?
That's the question you have to raise.
And we need local police because they supposedly are accountable to we, the people.
I wasn't listening to your commercial, I was laughing, officer, go after yourself.
He didn't seem to be very, very accountable to the citizens there.
So that's what you're seeing, the federal government is coordinating all this.
The equipment handouts, by the way, have zoomed under Obama, they actually slowed down under George Bush.
2013 was the biggest giveaway of all time of military equipment to local police departments.
Right.
Well, and you know, I wonder when you talk about the hollow point bullets for the Social Security Administration, I mean, they would hire that out if they needed to kill somebody, they would get the FBI or the ATF or the local cops to do it anyway.
It makes me sound it makes me wonder whether they have their own welfare for arms manufacturers.
Not only that, all of them have SWAT teams now, the Department of Education, as I show on my book, a gun with a wolf, they actually do SWAT team raids for overdue loans.
Oh, you know what?
Just think about that.
That's right.
I mean, they're doing it face down on their lawns.
One case, they actually threw a guy down, his name is Kenneth Wright, it's in my book.
It was his wife they were looking for.
Neighbors watched the SWAT team raid.
So the IRS has their own SWAT teams.
Again, these folks are dressed in black outfits.
They come through your door at 3 a.m. in the morning with flashbang grenades.
Well, you notice the branch Davidians who are the ones who paid the ultimate price for all this to be established, because after the government massacred all of them, after they picked that fight in the first place and then finished the fight off six weeks later, they said, yeah, right, everybody.
And the American people said, yeah, take that for interrupting my game shows for six weeks, you sons of bitches.
And so that was when the military bases across America opened their doors wide for your local sheriff's department to come and be turned into so-called hostage rescue team killers.
So it's been 20 years like this.
Yeah, 20 years, over 20 years.
And since that was at the dawn of the Clinton administration, all the liberals were just like, I don't care as far.
They wanted to believe that, you know, the Davidians were a bunch of, you know, right wing white supremacists.
Didn't matter.
Half of them were black in there almost or anything like that.
They just wanted to ignore it when we could have got the civil rights left, could have started being good on this.
After all, the raid was planned during the Bush senior administration, right?
They could have been good on this if they had cared enough about those Davidians.
But they, along with the law and order, right wing Rush Limbaugh led rallied around the cops and the government, Newt Gingrich and all them went without saying, without question that that was the right thing.
And then so the we had failed the test or we'd passed it depending on how you look at it.
And they decided, OK, look, there's no limit on how much we can militarize in the American people's own neighborhoods.
They won't do anything about it.
Yeah, you know, and David Koresh, the fellow who supposedly was a leader, he jogged during the day.
They could have just arrested him on a road.
I don't there.
There is a mentality of the raid mentality that just almost sometimes I'm afraid rather do the raid, get it over with, instead of just taking a lot of the police shootings I'm seeing happening where Michael Brown may be the case.
We don't know for sure.
Why?
Why don't they just wound people off and shoot them in the kneecap, the foot?
Why in the head?
I don't get it.
The unarmed shootings of citizens across the country.
But the crazy thing is crime in America right now, according to government statistics, is at a 40 year low.
The officers getting shot in the line of duty is at a 50 year low.
So why all the equipment?
Why all the paranoia?
And paranoia is the word that I'm seeing up.
Hollow point bullets, tanks, vehicles, blackhawk helicopters to cops.
And again, I see a lot of good cops out there that don't like this, but it's a very dangerous press.
Why use the word war zone?
It's it looks like a war zone to me with camouflage outfits and tanks and pulling rifles at people and grenade launchers, by the way.
Night vision equipment.
Sure.
Well, you know, the war zone book before last, Glenn Greenwald wrote Liberty and Justice for some about how where we're nearing totalitarian levels of enforcement against the American people here, the government and the individuals who make it up can do anything that they want and get away with it all the time.
And that goes right.
Very richest people, too, where there's really the rule of law is a complete joke when it comes to actual accountability for when they cross their own supposed lines.
Yeah, because the courts, by the way, give the police qualified immunity.
That's a phrase that you can't hold them accountable.
You just can't hold them accountable anymore.
It's a routine.
When we get in cases with police, I know we're going to the police are going to be excused immediately out of the case.
It's called qualified immunity, folks.
Look it up.
It's a you can't hold police accountable.
And that's a dangerous thing.
If you can't hold someone who's that armed accountable for anything, then you're going to get that mentality where the guy's pulling the rifle at you and saying, go after yourself.
I'm going to shoot you just because you're exercising free speech.
Right.
Yeah.
That one goes back 20 years to or maybe before.
But I remember the lawn where you see the FBI hostage rescue team sniper that shot Ricky Vicky Weaver in the face during that state.
I remember that he was indicted in Idaho.
And then the feds somehow finagled the court to just cancel that charge.
The federal court canceled the state charges, moved the case to federal court and then dismissed it, said he had immunity.
Yeah, that's the doctor.
And it's very, very difficult.
The the case of the kid in Atlanta got its face burned off.
The city now is refusing to pay any of the expenses connected with that kid.
The medical expenses.
They're refusing.
And that that that blew our mind.
We've actually contacted their lawyer and said we'd be willing to assist in that case, at least to get some compensation.
I saw their lawyer on TV say that the county had promised them that they would take care of it.
Well, they didn't do it.
Yeah.
Bad times.
All right.
Well, taking the temperature of this thing, it's pretty high.
It's pretty bad.
But thanks for your time.
Thanks for your analysis.
Appreciate it, John.
Thank you, sir.
That's John Whitehead.
He's at the Rutherford Institute, Rutherford dot org, turning America into a war zone.
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