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 on the line, I've got Andrew Coburn, Washington Editor of Harper's Magazine and of course, author of Kill Chain about the drone wars, et cetera, not just the drone wars, but the terror wars.
Check out this one.
It's called The Enemy's Briefcase at Harper's, and there's no possessive apostrophe there.
It's The Enemy's Briefcase.
That's interesting.
Welcome to the show, Andrew.
How are you doing?
Great to be with you.
I'm doing fine.
I thought maybe this was a reference to the fake Iranian nuclear laptops, the Enemy's Briefcase.
This is a briefcase named The Enemy's Briefcase?
Yep.
It's really, it's probably really, in reality, it's probably a computer file, but it contains the list of those people deemed subversive who would be rounded up or who could be rounded up in the, if the president so decides.
It's one of what we call presidential emergency action documents.
And there's a lot of those, and they all relate to basically the secret powers, the powers that the president has, which he can invoke really when he feels like it, to do all sorts of interesting things like declare martial law, round up millions of subversives, suspend habeas corpus, and a whole bunch of other things.
On the books, on these, you know, Trump, no one ever really talked about these at all until Trump started bragging about it.
I mean, he's such an idiot that he talks about it in public.
He says, I have powers that no one knew about.
You know, I can do what I want.
And sad to say, that's actually true.
Right.
All right.
Now, so a couple of things.
First of all, this is one of the things that got me interested in politics in the first place, was this came out during Iran-Contra, that they had these plans that went so far as to suspend at least all effective process guarantees in the Bill of Rights, if not the entire constitution, and Rex 84 and Garden Plot and all the continuity of government.
I've spoken with William Arkin, who is the real expert on continuity of government and the different plans and that kind of thing over the years, and in fact, twice in the last year, because it came up again with the COVID outbreak for a time there.
And I'm pretty sure, although it was 25 years ago, so forgive me, but I'm pretty sure this was touched on in your wife's book, Out of Control, about Iran-Contra, Leslie Coburn's book, which was the first serious political book I read in high school back in, say, like 1994 or something like that.
So, and in fact, my understanding then was the new world order is going to suspend the constitution and declare martial law and cancel all the elections and turn America into a dictatorship pretty much any day now.
But that was 25 years ago, and it was actually reporting on stuff that had happened about 10 years before that, and it never happened.
They keep holding these silly elections and having these horrible presidents.
And then I wanted to say one more thing, you can say whatever you want about that, but also I wanted to say one more thing just to set up too, which is that you're not the type to, you know, get caught up in a bunch of Russiagate nonsense or any of these kinds of crazy, you know, mainstream liberal conspiracy theories about Trump, and you haven't been.
So it seems like you're taking the opportunity of this discussion to bring up this topic that's really much larger than Trump.
But I wonder whether you're really worried that he's going to try to pull some stunt with these powers during the election here.
Well, I mean, yeah, right on both, right on all your points.
I got to say, yeah, Leslie's book did bring out the thing that Oliver North was involved in, which was, as you mentioned it briefly, Rex 84, which was this exercise to really FEMA, Federal Emergency Management Agency, to round up, you know, quote unquote, subversives.
And interestingly, that came up very briefly in sort of like a blink of an eye during the Iran so-called congressional investigation, when one congressman, Jack Brooks, actually asked Oliver North about this exercise, whereupon Senator Inouye, the Democratic chair or one of the chairman chairs of this so-called investigation, immediately shut him up, saying, oh, you know, we're not going to talk about that.
So it's you know, it's a very I make that point to raise that point to say this is a bipartisan affair.
All right, Andrew, actually, I have that clip.
Let me play here real quick for the people.
It's real short.
General North, in your work at the NSC, were you not assigned at one time to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?
Mr. Chairman, I believe the question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area.
So may I request that you not touch upon that, sir?
I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami Papers and several others that there had been a plan developed by that same agency, a contingency plan in the event of an emergency that would suspend the American Constitution, and I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was the area in which he had worked.
I believe I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage.
If we wish to get into this on certain arrangements can be made for an executive session.
All right.
So as you said, that's a Jack Brooks, Democrat, represented from Texas, shut down by Senator Daniel Inouye.
It was a joint committee there.
Senator Daniel Inouye from Hawaii for daring to.
As I said, it shows, you know, plans to plans to, you know, the possibility of suspending the Constitution is has bipartisan support, as you can gather from that exchange.
I mean, they never did go into it in as far as I know.
Well, I do know even in a classified venue during that investigation.
So you asked about, you know, yes, of course, I haven't.
You know, I've had no truck with the.
I have no truck with the sort of liberal QAnon versions of QAnon, which is, you know, the Russia gate, you know, paranoia and, you know, Putin's puppet, which is, you know, manifestly nonsense.
You know, Trump has been actually as as much of a Cold War, you know, proponent against Russia as any of his predecessor or anyone else.
But on the other hand, you know, he is you know, he's a very dangerous character.
I mean, he is, you know, by inclination a fascist, I think.
And so it's I think it's worthwhile, you know, first of all, to bring it up in this context of Trump, you know, pasting an election he may well lose and, you know, he's capable of anything.
I mean, you know, he's you know, he's he's getting very maybe it's the steroids at work or whatever.
But he's getting very strange indeed.
Some of the things he's saying and tweets, he retweets and so forth.
So that's point one.
And point two is, as I tried to, you know, say in the article, certainly at the end, this is, you know, even if Trump goes away tomorrow or come sometime between now and January 20th, that this this situation will still be there, that there'll be these latent powers in existence on the secret books for any president and maybe one sort of just as evil but smarter than Trump to come along.
I mean, as I say in the piece, you know, presidents, we now revere retrospectively, like even God help us, George Bush, you know, you know, absolutely trampled on the Constitution and got away with it.
You know, Trump, you know, suffered no Bush suffered no sanction for all the things he did and nor did Obama was able to start killing U.S. citizens and no one really complained.
So we're you know, we're always on the edge, I feel, and that's not going to go away with Trump.
Well, you know, one of the things that William Arkin was talking about was so concerning to him about this stuff is that you really have like the shadow government in waiting for people are designated in secret, but they're supposedly people that we would have heard of from our longtime political establishment that we could trust in case, I don't know, somebody nukes D.C.
But then let's say, well, we still have Hillary Clinton and Donald Rumsfeld and a few other people who have held high office before Colin Powell.
So we're just going to put them in power, something like that.
But one of the things he talked about was that, you know, even if they were alive, that under the law, the 25th Amendment, where Nancy Pelosi or then the president pro tem of the Senate, I forget who that is right now, but that they would actually not be in the line of succession, succession, sorry, that that the continuity of government plan has a life of its own.
And this whole other kind of shadow government, that's really not what you would expect in terms of the way they outline it, that it's to be the president, the vice president, then the speaker, the president pro tem of the Senate, then the secretary of state, secretary of defense, etc.
That that's not actually how it works at all.
That it's way worse than that, even where some level of emergency, I guess you would have to have the president, the vice president killed or incapacitated or isolated somehow or something.
But something as drastic as that, and you could really have this whole brand new government sort of spring up, I don't know, in Colorado Springs somewhere or something, and just claim the authority over the nation.
Sure, I mean, you know, this goes back a long way, Eisenhower on his own, he divided the country up into, you know, post the apocalypse into nine regions and basically nominated corporate pals of his who would be the go lighters, you know, in each in each of these regions, you know, no one else.
They were, you know, I can't remember any of the names, but they were sort of corporate honchos that Eisenhower had played golf with and quite liked, and they were going to be in charge.
And that's gone on your exact.
I mean, you know, as I've written, the one of the people who's really was very or two of the people very much into the whole continuity of government idea were Rumsfeld and Cheney.
Oh, yeah, this is a big part of your book on Rumsfeld, everybody you got.
Sorry to interrupt you.
You got to read Andrew's book on Rumsfeld.
It's called Rumsfeld.
And man, it'll blow your mind.
I'm sorry, but it's such a great book.
Then there's like 100 great things in there.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, well, so one of the things I liked, I was pretty interested to find out was that all the time when he was, you know, when after he was secretary of defense the first time in the Ford administration and he went on to be a corporate executive, he loved he would never miss a continuity of government exercise where he could go to some underground lair somewhere and, you know, play president.
Year in, year out, and he was joined a lot of the time by Cheney.
Cheney would sometimes miss them.
We'd sometimes sometimes find something better to do.
But Don was always there and he always they'd simulate, you know, they'd play games, they'd simulate a nuclear crisis.
And Rumsfeld always went for the extreme option, which was strategic nuclear exchange, blowing up everything.
That's what Rumsfeld was really into.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's actually come up.
I cite you on that on the show from time to time about him.
And, you know, whether we're talking about nukes or whether we're talking about Rumsfeld, it's such an important anecdote where I think the way you write it in the book, too, was that the games would be designed to give off ramps where we have like a two day delay and maybe we could get the king of Spain to negotiate or something.
Right.
And instead, he just still keeps dropping H-bombs and refuses to call a halt.
Yeah, yeah, that's that's our Don.
And it's so that's the mindset and, you know, I mean, he must be getting a bit old for it now and that they use him anymore.
But who you know, who, you know, is, you know, as Arkin said, you know, we have this whole shadow government waiting and very, very well financed, by the way.
It's billions and billions of dollars.
And, you know, it just doesn't get much discussion.
That's quite a good book.
I don't know if you've covered it.
A Raven Rock that came out earlier this year.
Yeah.
By a guy called Graf.
It's worth it's worth a look.
He's, you know, he's traced the history of it and he's quite good on the, you know, how elaborate this system is.
I mean, the whole mountains being a whole row all over the place being hollowed out.
You know, that's been going on now for, you know, since really the late night since the Truman era, in fact.
And it just gets bigger and bigger and nothing ever slows it down.
It's a great literally a money pit.
So that's the, you know, that's the context of all this.
Yeah.
You know, it really is like Dr.
Strangelove and people say that and it's a satire.
And the reason it hits home is because of how close it is to the truth.
Right.
But these people really are as mad as any human animals could possibly be with their nuclear war plan.
You know, I had this guy, Tom Kalina, on the show to talk about the nuclear sponge where they deliberately spread, you know, Minuteman silos all across Nebraska, Colorado, the Dakotas, Montana, etc., just to draw the Russians fire to these, you know, mundane's in flyover country in order to, you know, soak up the hit in order to protect the coasts for our betters who, you know, in all cases would have been the ones who got us into the nuclear war in the first place.
And, you know, what the answer to that is, we'll just build more shelters for ourselves.
We'll just hollow out more mountains for ourselves and leave the mundane's to bake in the nuclear fire.
Right, I wonder if Trump understands this, because, of course, that would be about saving what he would call Democrat states, wouldn't it?
Yeah, maybe he'll start pulling the silos in Central Park or something.
Exactly.
Which would be fair enough to me, I think, you know.
Yeah.
The other point, you know, the thing is.
This has been allowed to happen, you know, that the, you know, that exchange you played earlier where they quickly shut up Jack Brooks when he tried to ask about this, you know, that both the I blame, you know, you have to blame the Congress, both parties who put up with this.
You know, there was a brief, as I talk about a lot in the piece, there was a brief flicker in the mid 1970s when, because of, you know, the the war, the backwash from Vietnam and Watergate and Nixon and, you know, the 74 Congress was a very, you know, I mean, think of nowadays, I mean, unthinkably sort of an amazingly liberal, progressive Congress.
Remember the 1974 Congress?
Congress was elected that year in, I think, the 75 or 76.
They came within about two votes, three votes in the Senate to break up the oil companies.
Can you imagine anything like that happening today?
I mean, they were that it was that radical.
Yeah.
The famous church committee and the less famous Pike committee that you write about in here.
Yeah, they they they really pushed and they were I mean, they they sent a little tremor of fear through the through the through the establishment, through the you know, through through the permanent government that we're talking about.
There's one there's one story that I didn't make it into the piece just because of the length, but I'd just like to might amuse you, which was that the church committee, because the church was running for president.
So he didn't want to be to kick over the traces too much.
But so he was negotiating with the White House and the CIA about what documents they could get.
And they got a lot.
But still, they observed boundaries.
Meanwhile, the Pike committee, Otis Pike was this tough old ex-marine from Long Island.
He had a different approach.
He promised his staff.
He said for every document anyone produced that Henry Kissinger of the CIA didn't want them to have, he would get an award, an immediate bonus of five hundred dollars.
And that's how the Pike committee got hold of a lot of dollars.
Incentives are important.
A friend of mine who was on the committee.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I guess I could say Greg Rushford, who was a staffer on the committee, told me this and he he said he doubled his salary in a year.
He he got hold of a lot of stuff.
That's that's you know, that's the attitude you need.
And, you know, God help us.
You're never going to get it today, unfortunately.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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I mean, exactly right.
I mean, can you imagine them really taking this on right now?
And so wait a minute.
Here's the thing, too.
And it's all my fault.
I didn't really let you explain going back the way you do in this thing.
This goes back to World War Two.
This is FDR and Truman, the real founding fathers of America, of our modern American empire.
And it's been since then.
And just how many layers of emergency are we under for for every war we fought?
We have an emergency.
We got one for drugs.
We got one for probably, I don't know, earthquakes.
But just how far do they go?
What kind of tyranny do they really describe here?
Well, you know, they the I mean, the great thing of the beauty of emergencies is that they're fungible so that you can use an emergency for, you know, the the drug war to you know, to do to do something else, to go and bomb another country.
I mean, George Bush used the war on drugs to invade Panama and kill a few thousand people.
It's and as you say, you know, I'm glad you brought that up.
It does go back to Roosevelt.
You know, we revere FDR, the New Deal.
And that was you know, that was great.
But, you know, he gave J.A. Hoover this vaguely worded sort of imprimatur to go after subversion.
It's undefined in 1938, I think it was.
And they agreed, as I say in the piece, that they agreed that, you know, there was no need to tell Congress about this.
So actually, this wasn't really understood until, as I say, that brief period of investigation in the 1970s that this this particular item of emergency had been there for before, you know, for 40 years.
You know, FDR, it's really you can't separate this out from this is, as you say, the warfare state.
I mean, actually, I found an example that FDR back when he was assistant secretary of the Navy in 1917 and he wanted to do he was all eager to get on with the war.
The new this unneeded this war against Germany.
And he found a way to get to speed things up in warming war preparations to get around Congress.
I mean, he he was really into this stuff.
And, you know, he he would.
So he had no trouble later on in facing World War Two and implementing these kind of states of emergency and, you know, wartime, you know, extra constitutional arrangements.
And Truman went along with it.
Eisenhower was very keen on it.
Kennedy, you know, absolutely didn't balk at it.
Johnson flouted the Constitution every which way.
And Nixon, we all know about, you know, it never it really never has gone backwards.
I mean, you have brief things like the War Powers Act, which was meant to stop them, you know, presidents launching wars whenever they feel about it.
We'll see how that's worked out.
How many wars are we in now that haven't been declared by Congress?
You know, the it's really once you start looking at it, it's quite staggering.
As you know, as a friend of mine who's been Joel McClure, a former White House official, you know, he said he looked into it a lot because he's also been a consultant on various things.
He said, if the president chooses to ignore it, the Constitution is no more than a gentleman's agreement.
And that's something people have to understand.
Right.
Yeah, that's true.
Simply, it's a tradition.
If you want to go by it, then you do.
And if not, forget it.
And it seems like, you know, at this point, it's really mostly just window dressing and public relations for an entirely new system that's not really one described by the Constitution at all.
But I wanted to note that just how great it is that we're in a period of time where someone can say, how many wars are we in?
And it's just a rhetorical question because everybody knows it's too difficult to even calculate them up in a 30 second kind of time frame.
So it's just, yeah.
How many wars are we in?
You know how it is.
Lots, plenty here, there and on this continent and in that continent and threatening one with Russia and China, too.
And who knows what?
Who can count them?
What a time to be alive.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then so now what are we talking about?
Like, say Donald Trump or Joe Biden or whoever, Bill Clinton, declared that I'm invoking all these national emergencies.
Well, I guess two questions here.
Wouldn't they really need an emergency like somebody nuked D.C. or something like that to justify even internally inside the government kind of going for the full overreach?
And then what would the full overreach look like in terms of military and and the erosion of state sovereignty and that kind of thing?
Well, you know, I think we're getting we got a smell of this with the, you know, with this with the the covid-19 epidemic, you know, that was that's an emergency.
That's I know you've discussed this on the show before that they, you know, they can start, you know, declaring, you know, telling people you can't leave your house, suspended, you know, you know, you know, taking control of food deliveries.
I think, you know, I think we're getting a little bit of a taste of it now.
And then, of course, everyone will agree.
My God, this is this is an existential crisis.
You know, I think, you know, this we're getting a taste of it or we could be getting a taste of it here and now.
What would it look like?
What would it look like?
I think, you know, it would be it would be first, you know, it would be like control, you know, even more, you know, censorship of the of the Internet, which we already we're seeing.
We're seeing that, too, you know, now actually imposed by the Internet companies themselves, as we as Twitter showed us a couple of days ago.
So, you know, it you know, it worked.
I think it'll be first if I see it happening absent of, you know, like a nuclear war, you know, first gradually and then suddenly you'll find, you know, little freedoms being chipped away.
What you can say on social media, then, you know, where you know what you can.
You know where you can travel, then, you know.
Sort of, I don't know, you know, how, you know, where you can shop, what you can buy.
What you know is that, you know, maybe then elections will start getting being postponed.
You know, some, you know, local elections.
I mean, it would be I mean, I can have to think of it some more.
But you could do a scenario where they're eroded.
They're eroded.
It wouldn't have to be that slow.
It could happen over, you know, a month or two and people would sort of go along with it.
I mean, the lack of protest over this little thing, you know, the Twitter censoring the New York Post, I thought that was pretty interesting.
I mean, the Republicans fuss about it, but I don't see, you know, widespread protest, which there should be.
I mean, I'm not I'm not, you know, invoking the saying that this was absolutely necessary.
It probably was a lot of that fate.
I don't know.
But still, I mean, as someone pointed out, supposing Trump's tax records had been, first of all, hacked by some foreign government by the Russians or the Chinese or something, and then given to The New York Times, would Twitter then, you know, would that be banned from, you know, internet discussion?
I mean, that's the we've got a precedent there.
So I, you know, I think it is very dangerous.
I think, you know, that, you know, we've seen since, you know, since 9-11.
I mean, you know, we've talked about this a lot, you know, the Patriot Act, the illegal wiretapping, the fact that no one suffered so much as a minute of incarceration for things like torture, for all the illegal surveillance of what we thought was illegal.
Turns out in their system, the parallel systems of law, it was entirely legal, because they just said it was.
So things have been going downhill at a fairly regular clip, wouldn't you say?
Yeah, it sure does seem like it.
Well, and you know, the thing of it is the government that the Constitution describes, it is, it's been generations now, since those were really the limits on the government's power.
So at that point, it simply is, it's sort of like in England, where they don't have a Bill of Rights, they have, you know, kind of their tradition, but no real Constitution.
And that's really how we are now, too, where it's a floating thing.
There's, I don't know if you saw this, the New York Times ran a major piece saying that free speech is just out of control, and we've got to have the government clamp down on it.
And, you know, justifying all of this, that, you know, that's one of the biggest problems in our society is people can say what they want, and it's just got to stop.
And they write that in the New York Times, because I guess they know it's not their voice that's going to be silenced, you know?
You couldn't make it up.
You couldn't make it up.
It's so insidious.
You know, there's, yeah, I mean, you know, I think it was Huey Long said, he was asked, I think it's a famous statement, he was asked if we could have fascism in this country.
He said, sure, we could.
We just have to call it anti-fascism.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Call it centrist, moderate liberalism.
Exactly.
Now, so, and I've seen these things, you know, going back, going down the list where they claim at least the authority to seize all modes of transportation, cars, trucks, seaports and airports and everything, all farms and agriculture and, and they don't stipulate if H-bombs start going off and rationing is the only way to get the surviving population through or anything like that.
You know, it just says, hey, they can essentially seize all resources in what they declare is an emergency.
It really, well, and I guess I should, I should phrase that in the form of a question.
Those are the ones that I've seen, but is that what you're talking about too, is they really are that extensive?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I mean, that's a very important, all, all resources, all productive resources, all forms of transportation, airports, as well as communications.
Yeah, it's all there.
So, you know, it's funny, I was actually thinking, I think the first place I read this is in Behold a Pale Horse by William Cooper, which is, you know, kind of the famous cult conspiracy book that has everything under the sun from aliens to JFK to the Fed to the, this kind of stuff.
That's true.
A cult classic.
Yeah.
A great work, a great work.
I agree.
Anyway.
Yeah.
So, yeah, it's nice to know that.
Yeah, no, he was right about that.
That William Cooper's craziest version of the latent totalitarian powers of any given American president was spot on and you can read about it in Harper's.
I mean, that's important.
Really.
You know, it's a great way to put it.
Yeah.
Great way to put it.
Because that's not, it might be a fringe topic, but it ain't fringe information.
It's true.
It's extremely important, you know, and, you know, so now speaking of the election, if this thing, I don't know, there's all these predictions that, you know, Trump is going to invoke these kinds of things and do anything it takes to stay in power.
But it seems to me like that's really just kind of PR spin, just kind of in its own way, a negative attack ad portraying him as that dangerous and that kind of thing.
But what do you think of that?
Well, you know, maybe.
But, you know, he is, there's two things going on.
I mean, it seems there's two things.
One is that, I mean, we shouldn't let, you know, what we're talking about, what I'm writing, written about, obscure the fact that, you know, the main way he's aiming to win the election is the way Republicans have been winning the election for elections most of the century, which is by, you know, old fashioned, straightforward voter suppression and, you know, stopping people voting or not counting their votes if they do vote.
You know, that's been fairly traditional and it's worked pretty well for them.
You know, the idiot Democrats chose to blame the 2016 defeat on Russia, whereas they could more, you know, more reasonably have blamed on the fact that, you know, black people in Wisconsin and Michigan, hundreds of thousands of them were prevented from voting, or if they did vote, their votes disappeared.
I mean, that's established fact.
I mean, the same thing happened in Florida in 2000.
So that's, you know, they're going to be very heavily, Trump is very heavily relying on that.
It's obvious, you know, the Republicans have been preparing for this for years.
You know, they have all these, you know, thousands of lawyers all ready to challenge every vote, every mailed in vote that they don't like.
I mean, that's going to be the dominant feature of the election, I think.
But, you know, beyond that, you know, Trump, you know, could easily, I think, I mean, I'm quite prepared to believe that, you know, we saw a little taste of this with the Lafayette Park business, you know, which was quite carefully gamed out ahead of time by Barr.
He's trying to present it as something he's all thought up in the spur of the moment.
But no, they've been figuring out how they could get, you know, sort of, this sort of strange amalgam of federal goon forces, you know, sort of, you know, the things we never knew existed, the Federal Protection Force, I mean, was involved, who the hell are they?
You know, the prison guards SWAT unit, all brought together to, you know, to club people and gas people in Lafayette Park.
I think that's, you know, that's an indication who would have, who would have imagined that could happen until now.
But it did happen.
And so we're going to see there's a real possibility we'll see more of it.
I don't discount this, you know, all the alarms about what Trump might do at all.
I'm quite prepared to believe it.
Well, what do you think about the other side of that, too, where it seems like the Democrats are projecting so much of that onto Trump that they're prepared to mount what seems like a color coded type revolution, where and and they're very open about it.
I mean, Rosa Brooks wrote about it in the Washington Post that essentially anything Biden landslide, they are going to fight and they're going to call people out in the street and they're going to just like with 2016 only more so refuse to accept the result and try to fight it out in court, even if they lose and even if they know they lost.
Well, they're also been sort of urging a military coup, don't forget, too.
You know, they they've been and I've heard I've, you know, listened in on meetings where, you know, very concerned liberal Democrats are talking about recruiting four star generals or retired, you know, senior military commanders, three and four stars to put pressure on their active brethren to intervene, you know, in the election.
Wow.
Pretty amazing.
Can you tell us more?
Maybe it's not.
I can't really.
It was it was kind of an off the record thing.
But yeah, no, I mean, I know I know these these disorders, but we know, well, I give you something we do all know about, which is two of I forget the name of one of them, Nagel.
Chad Nagel.
No, Chad Nagel's the the writer.
No, John Nagel, the the Afghan war counterinsurgency guy.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Right.
You know, one of Petraeus's pets.
Right.
He he and a colleague, someone like him, whose name we both forget, you know, they actually when France urged military intervention, urged a military coup.
And if they said that, I really feel very positive that General Petraeus, retired General Petraeus was encouraged, you know, encouraging that.
And I have a pretty good idea who General Petraeus thinks should be in charge of any such coup or be the beneficiary of it, don't you think?
Anyway, so then, you know, it's all this is very unsettling talk on on all sides.
So there we go.
I'd say so.
The only thing and look, I swear I'm not a partisan on either side of this.
I'm just Howard Cosell calling the score.
But I think that probably the solution is going to be the likely result, which is Donald Trump is going to win by a convincing amount.
And the Democrats aren't going to be able to do a damn thing about it.
And Biden, no matter what his cheerleaders say, is not going to try to push it.
And then that's going to be it.
The incumbent always wins, you know, my whole lifetime.
I mean, Jimmy Carter doesn't count, but you know, we all know about the October surprise.
And Bush senior doesn't count because he was the 12th year of Reagan Bush.
So that wasn't the same thing really as being just a one term president.
But I think Trump has all the advantage going into this thing, honestly.
Yeah, not sure I did.
I don't necessarily agree.
I, I fear you might be right, but I don't.
I don't think it's right.
I mean, I'm talking to you from rural Virginia, where would you know, in a red district, where four years ago, you never saw a democratic sign.
Because the Democrats were afraid and also because Hillary Clinton's idiot campaign staff said, you know, didn't believe in yard signs.
People anyway, people didn't put them out because they were afraid.
The Russians stole them all.
Well, they're afraid that they're quite reasonable that the Republicans would come along and seize them or target their house or something.
But then I have to say, uh, two years ago, when Leslie actually ran for Congress, and she encouraged, you know, she gave out 1000s of signs.
And, you know, there were a lot of democratic signs around the place.
This year, I'm just it's an amazing, you know, you go around places, you know, districts, little town villages, I would never have imagined that a Democrat would even poke his nose there.
I'm seeing Biden Harris signs.
So I don't know, I don't know, I don't share your necessarily share your view that Trump has gotten the bag.
Well, like we're talking about the closer the worse it is for the country, really, I mean, it's if Biden wins convincingly, then that's fine, too.
I just hope that it's not one of these, you know, very hard to determine.
And then finally, you have the popular vote in the Electoral College and conflict again, and all this kind of thing is gonna that could, yeah, cause some problems.
And everybody's so raring to go.
Everybody's so prepared already to fight about it after election day, that who knows what could happen really, I guess, you know?
Really?
Yeah.
Well, meanwhile, you know, side of side of the New York Times story, you know, all these people, well, everyone knows, you know, people, millions and millions of people are, you know, on the bridge are really hungry.
Children are hungry.
I mean, you know, just catastrophic what's going on in every respect.
Yeah, listen, Scott, I have to go off and do something else in a second.
Sure.
This is as always been great.
Yeah.
Well, thank you again for coming on the show.
It's great to talk to you as always, Andrew, and everybody go and check this out.
They'll let you pass the paywall for a day or two here.
I think it's a Harper's dot org, the enemies briefcase.
Yeah.
And let me, let me just say a little tip.
If you go on the, you know, go to the Harper's website and you're not a subscriber, it's only 20 bucks a year.
It's not bad.
And an annoying sort of thing, telling you to subscribe appears as a little blue square, click on the blue square.
And I'm, I think it goes away and then you can read it for free.
That's great.
Yeah.
And it's an important one.
The enemy's briefcase secret powers and the presidency by Andrew Coburn.
Thank you again, sir.
Hey, thank you, Scott.
The Scott Horton show anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA APS radio.com antiwar.com scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org
