08/28/14 – James Bovard – The Scott Horton Show

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Peace and freedom.
Alright kids, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And I got my good friend Jim Bovard on the line.
He's from The Future of Freedom Foundation and Amazon.com, where he actually wrote most of the books that they sell there.
Let's see, I can do this pretty well, I might miss one or two, but there's the free trade fraud, no, the fair trade fraud, and the farm fiasco, Feeling Your Pain, see the F's there, FFF, huh, huh, Feeling Your Pain, Freedom in Chains, and what are some more Clinton era ones, Why Scott Hates Bill Clinton So Much, something like that.
And then from the Bush years, of course, there's Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, and then the Bush and Deficit Democracy, which is still on the Scott Horton number one bestseller list of all time.
It's so damn good.
And then the latest is his memoir, which is called Public Policy Hooligan, and it's a hell of a lot of fun too.
So there's all Bovard's books.
You should read all of them because they're great.
Even the ones from back in the 90s, you know, for historical purposes, kind of like today's interview.
Welcome back to the show, Jim, how are you doing?
Doing good.
Thanks for having me on, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
And yeah, I got you on to talk about history.
It seems like only yesterday to me, but I guess it's it could be back before some listeners were born here on the show now.
And it's at jimbovard.com, Eric Holder and the Waco cover up.
And you had this piece in the Washington Times about Eric Holder and how this is a whole other interview.
It could be about how back when he was at the Justice Department in the 90s, he was in charge of accountability for killer cops in Washington, D.C., and never did do his dang job.
But then in this other article, you and you can clarify that in a second.
But then this other article, you talk about how you you referenced in there his role in helping to cover up the Waco massacre, which is of special interest to me and always will be.
So that's why you decided to go digging through your archives and pull up this old Spectator article about Waco, which does include some of Eric Holder's role in the cover up, even the cover up of the cover up there.
And so let's talk about that in just a second.
But first of all, clarify what I got wrong about that.
The first Washington Times piece there.
Yeah, the Eric Holder was U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia from 1993 to 1997.
As such, he was responsible for policing the local police because it's the strange setup they have in D.C. that the U.S. attorneys like the ultimate person that files lawsuits against the government's conduct within the district.
And during the time he was U.S. attorney, the D.C. police had the highest rate of shooting civilians in the country.
And Eric Holder never noticed.
And not only that, but there were a number of cases where the D.C. police shot black teenagers and then basically lied about it.
And Eric Holder just kind of, you know, didn't really raise a fuss about that.
And a lot of the cases it didn't even notice.
Something that the D.C. police were famous for was shooting in the cars of unarmed drivers, doing that at a rate 20 times higher than the New York City police.
Eric Holder never noticed.
Amazing.
And you know what?
See, we can't change the subject back to Waco for another couple of minutes here because, of course, this is the guy who is being sent out to make sure that everything is A-OK in Ferguson because the Bill of Rights is inside out in America now.
It's now a mandate to the national government instead of a list of restrictions against them.
And so if something's wrong on your local level, there's only one way to look and that's up to your boss's boss and hope that DOJ will come and protect your civil rights and whatever kind of nonsense.
Which, I mean, in some cases, important stuff happens there and people are protected.
But it seems like a kind of back ass words way of approaching things to me.
But especially, I don't know if you saw this, but I need your comment on even if you didn't see it.
I'm telling you it's true that a whole bunch of progressive and liberal groups have written an open letter to Barack Obama and to the Congress calling for the establishment of a police czar at the Department of Justice who will oversee the implementation of the normalization of police methods across the country.
And it sounds like real nationalization beyond what even the Department of Homeland Security ever was.
Well, it's bizarre at several levels.
Just to step back from the Ferguson case, Eric Holder made a big deal last Thursday visiting the parents of the 18-year-old guy that had been killed by the local cop there.
During the time that he was a U.S. attorney in D.C., he never bothered visiting the parents of teenagers who were unjustifiably killed by the D.C. police.
And the national police czar stuff, you know, I'm starting to wonder if liberals don't have a sharp learning curve.
And something which is kind of amusing is to see a number of the members of the black caucus, congressional black caucus, in the forefront pushing for this because most of them, except for John Conyers of Michigan, have paid very little attention to misgovernment or misdeeds by the FBI, except when the FBI is prosecuting corrupt congressmen.
Right.
Yeah, and, you know, I can, I'm sympathetic, you know, because I guess I had all liberal teachers when I was a kid.
My parents are, you know, moderate to liberal types.
And so I was raised at least to...
You're Texas, though.
You know, Texas liberals are different.
Well, yeah, that might be true.
Although my parents are transplants.
So my dad was like a Bobby Kennedy guy.
But so the way I was raised was to understand that Abraham Lincoln and then a hundred years later, LBJ freed the blacks.
Finally, Lincoln did half a job and then LBJ came and finished it.
And the people of the states were never going to treat black people fairly until the national government said, if you don't, we're going to put you in prison.
And finally, then they had to begin.
And so, you know, poor and minorities and and women's rights, a lot of things, a lot of even, you know, call it progressive or libertarian type virtues in due process on the part of people in the states and subject to state jurisdiction is because of federal civil rights legislation and court rulings, you know, the Miranda ruling and these kinds of things.
And so it can be very hard for people to break out of that narrative and say, yeah, but in this case, it's clearly the federal war on drugs and the federal welfare for Lockheed program of giving all these excess surplus weapons to the locals that have got us into this situation.
So maybe Lincoln and LBJ were great if you were poor and black and powerless.
But that doesn't mean that, you know, Eric Holder and Barack Obama are the solution to this crisis that they have helped to cause right now.
Well, the fundamental problem with a lot of the stuff that was done in the 1960s was it was a vast expansion of government power.
And in the following decades, there was a vast increase in the number of criminal statutes.
So the government had far more pretext to throw people in jail.
And it's sad.
It's sad that the civil rights narrative stops before the vast increase in the federal prison population, federal and state prison population, which has ravaged, you know, especially low income groups in this country and had far more adverse effect than some of the things that the feds were targeting as problems in the 1960s.
Yeah.
Well, you know, of course, as us libertarians have been saying all along, it's the war on drugs is responsible for as much of it as anything.
And and there's been a lot of really strong support among, for example, black Protestant ministers and prominent people in black communities across America for harsh drug laws under that same old mistaken status theory that, well, if we don't want them carrying around drugs in their pocket, give them a real stiff sentence for it.
But without really thinking through the consequences where now there are more blacks in prison than there ever were slaves in the South.
Well, and I'm not sure about those numbers, but take a step back.
That's what Michelle Alexander says in her book.
OK, well, Eric, Eric Holder is now talking about how he wants to roll back some of his mandatory minimums.
But when he was U.S. attorney for D.C. in the mid 1990s, he was urging the D.C. city council to enact a mandatory minimum law in which people caught with one point five ounces of marijuana could get sent to prison for up to five years.
One point five ounces and make an automatic presumption the person is a dealer, throw them in prison up to five years makes no sense at all.
There was there were some speeches he was giving.
He was complaining about violence tied to the marijuana exchanges in Southeast D.C. there in a rougher part of town.
It never occurred to him that, you know, if you made it legal, people wouldn't be shooting each other for it.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Now, hold it right there.
I got an anecdote along those lines, especially regarding D.C.
Jim Bovar, the great Jim Bovar, FFF dot org, Jim Bovar dot com.
Back in a sec.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton on the line is Jim Bovard, my good friend and the author of a hell of a lot of great books.
The latest is Public Policy Hooligan, great memoir there.
And he's one of the few people who is good on the Waco massacre back in real time.
It was so few and far between.
And I actually didn't even really know about the libertarian movement and and and Jim and his work on Waco back then.
The only people I knew cared about it all were more like right wing populist patriot types.
Everybody else seemed to just completely give the government a free pass.
And then especially after the Oklahoma City bombing for years there, it was the perfect inoculation.
You couldn't say a word about Waco without people trying to accuse you of being in on it with McVeigh somehow, as though, you know, the Branch Davidians somehow had gone forward in time and done the Oklahoma bombing to justify what had happened to them back two years before.
Some ridiculous thing, but anyway, it was a time machine.
Yeah, yeah.
And the whole thing is crazy.
And then, of course, you know me, there's a gigantic I think one of the biggest scandals in American history is the cover up of the Oklahoma bombing and how all McVeigh's friends were all flip states, witnesses and undercover informants and worse.
And so the government was compromised.
It was Bob Ricks, the spokesman for the FBI during the Waco massacre, was the head of the Tulsa office who shut down the ATF's investigation into the Nazis that later did the bombing.
It's all his responsibility.
Same group of criminals again.
And there's one that I don't know if you I guess you've never really gotten into that one before, Jim.
I sure would love to read what you had to write about it if you did.
But anyway, when it comes to Waco, this is a huge part of my political education.
I was 15 at the time.
I'd already learned about Ronald Reagan.
Mr. Drug War was also the hemisphere's greatest cocaine dealer.
And so and I was always raised to disrespect Republicans anyway, which was nice.
My whole childhood, I wasn't loyal to the government.
But then as soon as Clinton got in power, he burnt the Branch Davidians to death and lied about it and got away with it.
And I knew that there was nothing better on the Democratic side than you get from these evil Republicans.
And so I never did have to be a Republican or a Democrat, a liberal or conservative.
My whole life, I've basically been a libertarian abolitionist of these scumbag murderers.
So anyway, that's just my preface for introducing Bovard's great work on the Oklahoma bombing.
And I'm going to read a little bit more about it.
Bovard's great work on the Oklahoma bombing.
He must have written a book worth of essays, investigative opinion pieces as they are, as he specializes in for The Spectator, for The Washington Times, et cetera, et cetera.
And the one that you republished here on your blog today, Jim, ran in The American Spectator in the year 2000.
And it's about really the last cover up of the Waco massacre, the Danforth report and Eric Holder's role in the compiling and the so-called investigation behind that report.
Please do tell, sir.
Well, Eric Holder was a point person back in a key issue after the Waco fireball was the the the feds were claiming they never had any responsibility for that at all.
And the feds have claimed it was complete slander to say that they had fired pyrotechnic rounds into the Waco building before it burst into flames.
Janet Reno testified that in 1995 in Congress.
And that was part of her her success in crushing a wave of skepticism on it back then.
But thanks to Mike McNulty, a very dogged investigator, he went in through the rubble and found a number of pyrotechnic rounds the FBI had fired on during the final day assault.
And that basically destroyed Janet Reno's credibility in 1999.
There were a lot of other details that came up that showed the feds had been lying up and down and back and forth on this.
Janet Reno got so upset that she sent, if memory serves, she sent U.S. marshals to go over and search FBI headquarters.
I might be wrong in that detail, but it's close if it's not dead spot on accurate.
And so in order to handle the controversy, Janet Reno appointed former Senator John Danforth to supposedly lead an independent investigation.
Danforth is known as a pious jack because he's he was one of the most sanctimonious members of the U.S. Senate, which is not an easy stand to achieve.
But John Danforth ran this investigation being managed basically like a puppet, I would guess, by Eric Holder.
And Danforth basically brushed all the evidence under the rug and came up with one excuse after another to justify what the FBI had did.
And then and then rushed to issue his final report before he was done investigating.
And he wanted to do that because he was under consideration to be George W.
Bush's vice presidential nominee in the summer of 2000.
But there was it was such a bizarre, bizarre report.
And it was captured that the thing that captured it best was was the comment that Danforth made when he issued their final report.
He said, as I flip through my page here, the thing he said is that he hoped he hoped his report would begin the process of restoring the faith of the people in their government and the faith of the government in the people.
And this was something that Eric Holder echoed when at the time report came out to the fact that we that we joined Senator Danforth and wishing that this report begins the process of restoring the faith of the people in their government.
And the whole key to that meant the whole key to restoring faith was to sweep the damning evidence under the rug and denied existed and find one contorted rationale after another for exonerating the government, even if the government had admitted it had made false statements or had done grave misconduct.
Yep.
And, you know, maybe this is a product of my era as well, Jim, that I was raised after Watergate to understand that it's always the cover up that gets it.
Not that the cover up is necessarily worse, but it just entails so many more crimes to try to get away with the original one that now you're basically just screwed.
And then so that always seemed it was so transparent at the time what was going on with this Danforth report, as well as all the other government reports exonerating themselves that had taken place before that.
And that's the part that just enraged me so much, even as much as the murders themselves.
Now, how in the world are you going to set up a test where you spray down all of the dirt on the ground with water to keep all the dust down?
You use flash suppression, suppressant ammo and extended length barrels.
And then you tell me that, oh, no, the flashes don't match the flare.
Well, yeah, but that's because you're lying.
I mean, what the hell is this?
Yeah, to take a step back, you were saying that the cover up is always worse than the crime.
Having worked as a journalist investigating a lot of these government abuse over the last several decades, most government cover up succeed.
And it's very rare for the for a government agency to simply implode because all its lies finally coming out.
It looked for a while in 1995 and 1999 that that might happen to the FBI with all its falsehoods on Waco, but they managed to patch up the ship and, you know, spin it and get people like John Danforth and Eric Holder to cover up the abuses and they marched merrily on.
It's it's it's hard to think of a cover up in which the perpetrators got what they deserved.
Yeah, yeah, it's really crazy.
And, you know, there's there's the whole thing about it, too, that I mean, and I think this is a big part of why they get away with it, too, is because the American people were in on it.
It's just like accountability for the Iraq war.
Come on, guys, let's get them.
And the American people are more than happy to form the lynch mob, to go in there and do the killing, to be the cheerleading squad for the actual Delta Force trigger pullers.
And so they don't want accountability for themselves either, even in their own minds.
And so they rather just go on.
Yeah, I would.
You know, there certainly were a lot of people who felt that way.
There were also a lot of individuals who who smelled something dirty from the very start.
Well, and they were speaking out or trying to speak out.
It was challenging to speak out then because there wasn't an Internet and it wasn't like the mainstream media is going to be publishing articles about like, gee, where's the FBI?
Looks like the you know, the FBI is bringing in tanks and the FBI is ramping things up and they're playing all these very loud tapes of rabbits being slaughtered.
Gee, I wonder if the FBI is out of their bloody minds.
Right.
Yeah, no.
I said that day I said, oh, come on, they're not showing the back of the building.
Why do you think they're only showing one side of the building?
Well, because in the back, they're killing those people.
You're telling me these people set their own children on fire is more plausible than a bunch of militarized cops, machine gun them to death and set their house on fire.
Give me a break.
And again, I was 15, but not stupid.
Well, and plus you were in Texas.
Well, yeah.
Well, and I didn't have bloodlust for those people.
And in fact, I was really, you know, kind of taken aback by the bloodlust of the neighborhood ladies.
I've told the story before about working at the grocery store and all the white ladies of Northwest Austin, one of those people dead.
I mean, the Capitol, the Capitol crime was interrupting their game shows and their their love stories.
And they wanted an end to this damn thing yesterday.
Fifty one day siege.
Are you kidding me?
Kill them all.
Well, it was interesting that there was almost no criticism on Capitol Hill when this when this went down.
Jack Brooks, I think, was the Texas congressman who said, well, you don't burn to burn them to death.
It serves them right.
Right.
John Conyers, Michigan congressman, to his credit, did challenge Janet Reno on this.
And if memory serves, Janet Reno started to cry during a hearing.
So but it's it's appalling that there was far that was not far greater backlash.
But, you know, once again, this is a government cover up that largely succeeded.
Yeah, there you go.
Jim Bovard dot com for this great article.
Eric Holder in the Waco cover up.
Thanks so much, Jim.
Hey, thanks, Scott.
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