All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing Francis Boyle.
He is a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law.
And I didn't know this, former legal advisor to Henry B. Gonzalez.
Very interesting.
Welcome back to the show, Francis.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me on, and Happy New Year to everyone in your listening audience.
Well, thanks very much, and Happy New Year to you, too.
Very happy to have you here on the show again.
And you got a very important piece that you guys put out there at the Institute for Public Accuracy.
Why not impeach Trump for war crimes?
And I guess I'll start with a quibble.
You seem to give a little bit of credence to the Ukraine thing here.
Well, did absolutely nothing wrong is a bit of a red herring, but you kind of give a little credence to that.
But then you kind of dismiss it anyway and say, that's nothing compared to the war crimes.
But I think many people, I would be among them, would be, you know, pretty much just see the Ukraine thing as just an extension of Russiagate, this giant hoax by the CIA and the FBI to try to undermine this, and the Democrats, to try to undermine the results of the last election that they can't stand.
Whereas the war crimes issue is an entirely different thing.
This is what he ran against.
He could have cut the whole thing and blamed it all on Bush and Obama, whose fault it was, and could have ended all this back three years ago, and instead he's only doubled all the wars and then some.
And you say he's broken the law in doing so, too, huh?
Well, Scott, first, let me agree with you about Russiagate.
I think it is all a big hoax.
And again, we've discussed it before.
I've always been a political independent.
I did not vote for President Trump.
I did not vote for Mrs. Clinton.
But I did spend 10 years studying everything about Russia and the Soviet Union at the University of Chicago and then Harvard, where I went through the exact same Ph.
D. program that produced Zbigniew Brzezinski before me, and offered both Russian history and Soviet politics on my Ph.
D. oral general examinations, which qualified me to teach Russian history and Soviet politics to Harvard graduates.
So my reading of the Russiagate situation is that you are correct on that issue.
I'm not here defending President Trump one way or the other, but I think that is a correct assessment.
On the other hand, his war crimes, his other serious violations of the Constitution, I think are far more significant, and the Democrats have not addressed them at all.
As a matter of fact, you had the Democrats yesterday adopting this resolution by Slotkin on the War Powers Resolution on President Trump.
And first of all, Slotkin is a central intelligence agency, once CIA, always CIA.
There are so many holes in that resolution that Trump and Pompeo could drive a truck through it.
And Pompeo was behind me at Harvard Law School.
He's a sharp guy.
He knows that he's spinning for President Trump on the legal issues here.
So this was pretty much kabuki theater yesterday by the Democrats on that Slotkin resolution.
So I think we really need to address these serious issues of war and peace here, because now in the last basically six months, we have dodged a bullet, two bullets, on a major war with Iran under the Trump administration.
Now fortunately, President Trump pulled back on both times with the drone that in my assessment clearly overflew Iranian airspace.
They were entitled to shoot down.
As we know, President Trump was in within 10 minutes of launching a major military attack against Iran that I think could have degenerated into outright warfare.
And now we have the assassination of General Soleimani, a violation of international law, an act of aggression against Iraq.
And the incident for the time being is closed.
But again, we could have had major military hostilities against Iran.
The problem here, and please understand, I'm not trying to explain away or justify or excuse President Trump or anything like that, but he still has all of these neocon advisors behind him advising him.
He has Pompeo, an outright militarist behind me at Harvard Law School, a member of the Federalist Society, which I've been fighting against since 1986, a believer in the unitary powers theory of the presidency, which Trump has articulated that I'm the president, I can do what I want.
Then next you have the National Security Advisor O'Brien, who people call as John Bolton White, and he is a protege of Pompeo.
You have Esper, another militarist who was with Pompeo at West Point, and then the Heritage Foundation.
Well, we know those people are right wing warmongers too, and he's another Pompeo protege.
And then you have bloody Gina Haspel at the Central Intelligence Agency, all egging Trump on to war.
And we know for a fact, as reported in the New York Times, it was Pompeo who was pushing the assassination of Soleimani, and I'm sure he knew full well what the consequences would be, which would be a full scale war against Iran.
Likewise, last summer, we know full well it was the neoconservative Bolton, and also Pompeo, and bloody Gina Haspel who were pushing Trump to go to war.
Those people, now Bolton is out, but O'Brien is Bolton White.
Those are the people that the president has around him today.
So Scott, I'm afraid that this situation is not going to go away.
We're going to have another incident here, and it could mean full scale war with Iran.
That's why I'm saying I think we've now dodged two bullets, but I don't know how many more bullets we're going to be able to dodge.
Another incident could set it all off.
It was an extremely dangerous situation.
If President Trump does pursue retaliation against the 52 sites in Iran, which he said he will do, we're going to see this whole region disintegrate into spasmodic warfare from at least Turkey all the way down to Yemen.
And there's already a lot of warfare there to begin with, Scott.
We have 80,000 troops over there.
We have the aircraft carrier strike force Truman, large numbers of naval ships, all within shooting distance of Iranian IRBMs and short-range missiles.
This could be a catastrophe.
Unfortunately, we dodged it, but I think it was only by the grace of God between you and me, Scott.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm a little bit less pessimistic just because I think that ever since the Bush years, the military had been decided that they just don't want to do Iran.
It's biting off more than they can chew, and they know it, and they know that old joke about they're a threat.
You can tell they're a threat because how come their country is so close to all our military bases and all that, but that also means we have thousands of guys within missile range that can't be defended from, really.
I mean, it gave us notice the other day, hey, get your guys out of the way.
We're going to launch a few missiles at the edge of the fence of your base or this kind of thing.
But it doesn't have to be that way.
We got thousands and thousands of guys at stake and assets all up and down the Western side of the Persian Gulf.
I think they like picking on Iran, but they don't want it to get too bad, and I don't want to put too much faith in that, in the Marines' fear.
But I think that they think that they would have to lose a lot of guys in the event of a war with Iran, not even just a full-scale invasion, but somebody's got to take out that anti-aircraft and, you know what I mean, it's a lot to try to do with just tomahawk missiles or something.
You couldn't.
Well, you're correct.
There would be massive casualties among US forces stationed over the Gulf.
The problem here, Scott, and the Pentagon's aware of that.
The problem here is if you follow what happened, it was the Pentagon and the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Milley, who put General Soleimani on the list of options for Trump to consider.
So they bear enormous responsibility here.
That was a completely reckless act.
Indeed, it was illegal to—and they know it.
You know, I've lectured at West Point.
The military have been heavily inculcated with the laws of war.
Milley and the Pentagon knew full well that this assassination would be illegal, and they did it anyway.
So that is the problem that confronts us today, Scott.
Yeah, well, and so, you know, kind of either way, even if he decided that he was an absolute, you know, Quaker pacifist from today on, he's still guilty of massive war crimes across the Middle East, and most especially, I think, in Yemen.
But I want to ask you about this because it's a bit of a special case.
It's the most merciless war, but it's also leading from behind.
Why?
It's the Saudi-led coalition, and geez, it's al-Qaeda and UAE and Saudi Arabia that are doing all the heavy lifting here, and America is simply providing intelligence and financial and armament support, and at least they were helping with the midair refueling.
Supposedly the Saudis have learned how to do that themselves now and don't need us anymore.
I don't know.
Maybe the Navy helps enforce the blockade, but it seems like, you know, America's the superpower and Saudi Arabia is the client state.
So there's a real question of who's whom and who on that one.
But at the same time, we should really clarify here, the reason they call this the worst humanitarian crisis on earth, it is, and they're killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in a deliberate starvation campaign, targeting the food supplies, the electricity, the water, the sewage, the farms, all the irrigation, the cholera hospitals in the middle of an outbreak.
It's just absolutely satanic evil going on there in Yemen.
And so I wonder, is there a way, I mean, legally speaking, do not Obama and Trump both belong in prison for this, and is it impossible that Trump could be impeached for that and driven out of office for an act of state rather than, you know, some side project like burgling a hotel or rigging an election or something?
Well, Scott, you are right.
Your listeners have to understand it was Obama who supported the Saudis in starting this, I would say, genocidal aggression now against Yemen and the people of Yemen.
And I will send you a speech by email, which you're free to distribute, denouncing Obama at the University of Illinois when the bootlickers here gave him an award.
And I organized a protest rally and I gave the keynote address and I condemned him for Yemen and Syria and Libya and a lot of other things.
And Obama was behind me at Harvard Law School.
He's a magna cum laude graduate like I am.
And we even had the same teacher there of philosophy of law, Roberto Unger, who publicly condemned Obama on the BBC and elsewhere saying, quote, Obama is a disaster, unquote.
That is certainly true.
I am not here to justify, again, President Trump, but yes, he could stop that war immediately.
The Saudis couldn't be doing anything over there without our green light, which was given by Obama.
It unfortunately has been continued by Trump, although it does appear we have applied some pressure to try to bring this thing under control recently by President Trump.
But my assessment, we could stop it tomorrow if we really wanted to, as you correctly point out.
And I've given interviews.
This verges on genocide, what the Saudis and the UAE has done there.
And we, starting with Obama, have aided and abetted and assisted the Saudis and the UAE.
So again, I agree with you there.
I'm not here to excuse President Trump at all.
Again, I'm trying to be, you know, objective and reasonable about this as I can.
But I mean, the question is, does their leading from behind Obama and Trump both letting the Saudis take the lead on this and all of that?
Is that any legal protection?
Or under the law as written, if you had the power to enforce it, you absolutely could apply it to this president and his predecessor?
Of course.
I mean, and I don't think it's really a case of leading from behind.
I think the Saudis and UAE, starting with Obama, have been doing Obama's dirty work for us as he sees it.
And then Trump, regretfully, is just continuing it, not to justify Trump, although it does appear that under U.S. pressure, the Saudis are making some attempt, perhaps a furtive attempt, to start to wind this thing down.
So unfortunately, the current crisis with Iran has complicated that.
I'm not sure to what extent those efforts are going to be continued.
Hey, y'all may have heard that me, Tom Woods, Dave Smith and a bunch of others are trying to do everything we can to recruit all our friends and audience members to join the Libertarian Party this year in order to support the candidacy of the great Jacob Hornberger.
We believe Hornberger is far and away the best candidate to bring our message of peace and liberty to the American people in this crucial and controversial election year.
But we need your help.
Step one, go to scotthorton.org to sign up for the National Libertarian Party.
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Bring your wives, father-in-laws, best friend Jimmies and whoever you can as force multipliers.
Please, make sure we win this thing so we can take hardcore anti-imperialist libertarianism to the general election.
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All right, let's do this.scotthorton.org slash lp.
And thanks.
All right.
Now and then.
But the thing is, too, about this Yemen war is it's completely unauthorized by Congress.
And not only that, but they passed war powers resolutions that the president vetoed, which I don't know if he has the power to veto it, but I guess they said he did.
So if you could answer that for us, but also that's a good segue into the recent, the war powers resolution passed by the house yesterday, which you said was so weak.
And I know one of those things about it was that it's a concurrent resolution, which is supposed to make it veto proof.
But I saw accusations that a concurrent resolution means that it's completely toothless and it's just a sense of the Congress and is completely non-binding.
So it seems like they got us in a great catch-22 there.
If we do the other kind, I forget what it's called.
He can veto it.
If you do the non-veto proof or the veto proof kind, then that's a lower ranking kind of resolution and also non-binding for that reason then.
Right.
Well, let me first deal with Yemen.
Scott, you are correct.
By assisting the Saudis in combat and the activities we were engaged in, and apparently we've had special forces over there, starting under Obama, we were already in violation of the war powers resolution.
And Obama knew that.
Again, he's a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School.
If you go back and you read all the campaign speeches that Obama gave on these types of issues, they were impeccable.
Once he got into power, he paid absolutely no attention at all to the constitution, the war powers resolution, his destruction of Libya, for example, murdering 50,000 people, and what he did to Syria and across the board.
Again, I dealt all this in my speech that I'll send you by email.
So yeah, we're already in violation of the war powers resolution under Trump.
It's an impeachable act if the Democrats wanted to do something, but they don't.
As I pointed out in my press release, they're going after Trump over Ukraine, Ukraine gate, and also obstruction of Congress.
Well, as I've said elsewhere, I'm from the south side of Chicago, and this is like the federal government going after Al Capone for tax fraud instead of murder and racketeering.
Now, to get to the resolution yesterday by Slotkin, and remember, she's CIA.
One CIA, always CIA.
And it's clear the Democrats are working hand in glove with the CIA against President Trump.
And so they're trying to appeal to the CIA and keep the CIA on their side.
The technical legal aspects of that resolution, the war powers resolution provides that in the event U.S. military forces are in a situation of hostilities or imminent hostilities, either House of Congress can pass a concurrent resolution that would require the president to stop in 30 days.
Okay.
But the problem there, and Pelosi knows full well, and I'm sure she's been advised by her lawyers and all the Democrats have been advised by their lawyers—I've dealt with the lawyers of the Democratic Party, they're very competent people—that legislative veto provision had been struck down by the United States Supreme Court in INS versus Chadha.
So they know, the Democrats knew as of yesterday, that that concurrent resolution wasn't going anywhere.
Now, that being said, of course, the Democrats could, if they wanted to, use a violation of that resolution as an article of impeachment against President Trump if he were to violate it.
He has not yet.
But if he were to violate it, despite the decision of the Supreme Court in INS v.
Chadha, because at the end of the day it is for Congress to enforce its war powers, not the U.S. Supreme Court.
So just to deal with the technical issues there, Scott, to sort them through, since you asked the question, I apologize to your listening audience to get so technical, but there it is.
I teach a course on the constitutional law of U.S. foreign affairs and, you know, spend a lot of time lecturing my students on constitutional war powers.
Well, don't worry, I have the most brilliant audience in the history of all audiences, so they'll understand.
Okay.
Well, that's good to hear.
I'm sorry to sound so much like a professor there, but it's a very technical issue.
Yeah.
No, it's important.
I have a lecture I have to give to my law students.
Well, you know, it's funny, too, that they had a resolution in the NDAA that had passed, you know, in addition to it, that then they stripped out during the conference committee and went ahead and sent on the $700 and whatever billion to Trump without any of the restrictions that they had passed.
And they had passed a bunch of great writers to that thing.
And that was one of them, was you can't start a fight with Iran.
Right.
You're correct.
And the Democrats caved in on that.
That's for sure.
So what can I say there, Scott?
Again, your listening audience has to understand that this is a lot of posturing and kabuki theater by the Democrats, both over impeachment and Iran and war powers, pretty much everything else.
You know, we have a presidential election campaign that is now started.
To some extent, we see President Trump engaging in the wag the dog phenomenon there with Iran that apparently has worked, broken the deadlock on Pelosi holding up the articles of impeachment and things of that nature.
So a lot of this is posturing on both sides, President Trump and his people and the Democrats and their people.
Yeah.
Well, there's still the Americans.
And you know, I think people got pretty excited about, you know, on the right, they got real excited about a new war for a minute there.
But then I think anecdotally, they were happy to hear that Trump decided to not have a war after all, this kind of thing.
So certainly it's not the Bush years anymore.
Things have really changed there.
And it's going to be up to the American people to move the margin this way or that and and either allow or disallow the common narratives to stand about how the American people feel about this stuff and how much they care or don't and that kind of thing.
But it's going to be a big election year and always around and, you know, anti interventionists getting their voice out there is at the height of importance.
It's the one they'd like to ignore the most.
But then again, it's also the consensus of everybody who doesn't have power.
So maybe there's a way that all of us together can move that margin a little bit, you know.
I think you're right.
If you look at the public opinion polls, the American people don't want more war.
We've been at war continuously since after September 11th, 2001.
You read the Afghanistan papers that just came out in the Washington Post.
Of course, we were lied to from the get go.
I even pointed that out.
I had a debate with Bill O'Reilly on September 13th, 2001 on war versus peace.
And he was arguing and praying for war.
And I went in there and made the best argument I could to the American people for a peaceful resolution of what had happened on September 11th, 2001.
So I've been fighting these wars since then, for sure.
And I think most American people agree, certainly with me, we don't want more wars.
But again, the problem here is that I regret to say President Trump has around him these neoconservative militarist advisors who I think will get us into another war somewhere.
They don't really care about the American people.
I think President Trump needs to fire all of them.
Maybe he could bring Senator Rand Paul in there as Secretary of State.
It seems to me Senator Paul is one of the few people there in the Republican Party and even the Democrat Party, well, with all due respect to Bernie Sanders, that's saying reasonable things here about how this matter should be handled with Iran.
As you know, it looks like Trump gave Senator Paul the green light to open negotiations with Zarif.
And then Pompeo and Bolton found out about it and put Zarif, the foreign minister there, on the Treasury sanctions list, basically making Zarif radioactive for Senator Paul to deal with and sabotaging Senator Paul's peace initiative there with Zarif.
So that's really what we're dealing with, Scott.
We want people around President Trump.
There are people, everyone around President Trump seems to want a war.
Yeah, that really does highlight the fact that there is at least one good bench worth of anti-war conservatives that he could staff his government with.
It's not just Paul, but we see Colonel McGregor on Tucker Carlson every night.
He could be the National Security Advisor.
Oh man, the sigh of relief I would breathe if that guy was the National Security Advisor.
And there's plenty to fill the National Intelligence Director, CIA Director, the Deputy NSC to run the actual NSC in the government and all that.
I mean, all that stuff is, there's one good bench at least of guys with the credentials who would get along with Trump enough who could get that job.
But he doesn't.
He doesn't see the mileage in that, apparently.
Unfortunately, right now, these neoconservative warmongers pretty much have Trump in their pocket.
Again, I understand President Trump spent his entire life in real estate transactions there in New York.
I guess he figures he has the best people he can around him.
But as you correctly pointed out, these are the same old people who have gotten us into wars for the last 20 years.
We don't need these people.
They're a detriment to our republic.
And yes, I think people surrounding Senator Paul, that's the type of people we need in there now to try to stop a war and reopen serious negotiations with Iran and try to get things back on track here, which I believe can be done, as Senator Paul was trying to do before Pompeo and Bolton sabotaged him.
Right.
All right, you guys, that's Francis Boyle, a great peace activist.
And I hope there's YouTube of that Bill O'Reilly performance there.
That sounds cool.
Why Not Impeach Trump for War Crimes is the piece at the Institute for Public Accuracy.
Thank you again for coming on the show, Francis.
Well, thanks, Scott, for having me on.
And really, I appreciate the level-headed, solid interview here, because if you're listening to the mainstream news media, all we have are warmongers on there, all these talking heads and blow them up and kill them.
And this is not the way that the United States government needs to be acting at this time.
This is the way.
All right.
Thank you again.
All right.
Thanks, Scott.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
