11/02/16 – Jeffrey Kaye – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
Check out the archives at LibertarianInstitute.org slash Scott Horton Show.
And introducing our friend Jeffrey Kay.
And he, of course, writes at GuantanamoTruth.com.
And he's the author of the new book, Cover Up at Guantanamo, the NCIS investigation into the, quote, suicides of Mohammed Al-Hanashi and Abdulrahman Al-Amri.
And we talked about that in our most recent interview.
And we've got a little bit of developments along those lines to talk about, along with some other things.
Welcome back to the show, Jeff.
How are you doing?
Scott, doing great.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Really appreciate you joining us, as always, here.
And so now I'm going to go back a month to McClatchy Newspapers from October the 5th here.
I know it's a long story, but I know you know all about it, and you have the most and best to say about it, as far as I'm concerned.
CIA officials ordered to testify in lawsuit over torture program.
So first of all, explain how could that be that that headline is even right, that a judge would ever say any such thing to anyone about anything?
Yeah, well, that's a, well, that is a good question.
I'd love to know what the judge, you know, I got to give him credit.
The judge's name is Justin Quackenbush.
He's up in Spokane, Washington.
And of course, you know, what pops into my head, why that Spokane actually has an interesting role to play in the whole torture scandal, which people may not realize.
But actually, the first break, really, in looking at people like James Mitchell and Jessen happened at the Spokane Spokesman Review.
And it's because Spokane happens to be the city where a major SEER headquarters is.
SEER meaning, your listeners don't know, it's a military department.
It means survival, evasion, resistance, escape.
And that is what they teach, you know, spies, military officers, pilots, all sorts of people, ways as if they're captured by some enemy, what to do.
And one of the major, most controversial things they do, and this is what James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen worked for, and they worked in Spokane, was to teach people supposedly how to resist torture.
And they did so in mock torture camps, where they literally put people through kind of a brief torture experience, supposedly to inoculate them and help them learn what the experience might be like.
And this has been going on for decades.
And that's where Mitchell and Jessen worked.
And they took the kinds of techniques they used for the brief torture sessions, and they used them and inflated them up and mixed them with other things to be part of the creation of the CIA's torture program.
And I'm emphasizing part, it comes up in this case, by the way.
But the big thing, of course, about this case is that the government has been successful in keeping anybody from being sued who's been involved in the torture program.
Right?
Right.
You know.
They just say it's a secret.
Right?
They just say, Your Honor, you have to throw out this whole case, not just some evidence.
You have to throw out this whole case because it's all state secrets and no business of any federal court at all.
And every judge has been perfectly happy with that up until now, pretty much.
Right?
It will harm national security.
Right?
And I think, am I right, Jeff?
And I know this isn't exactly your expertise, but isn't it right that previously, and I should say you're a psychologist, not a lawyer, for people who are interested.
But wasn't it the case previously, or haven't you heard this, that before George W. Bush, all they ever did with the state secrets doctrine, which was invented by the courts in the first place, was to exclude certain information from trials.
But then, starting with the Bush years, they started excluding entire cases from being heard at all.
And Obama has continued that.
It does seem to me that I've read that, you know, again, I'm not, actually even beyond a lawyer, I think you'd need a legal historian to look and see, is that true?
Is that what happened in the 90s?
Is that what happened in the 80s?
Certainly we know way back in the Watergate trials and things like that, that they tried to exclude information based on national security.
And a lot of those, you know, cover-ups then and the controversies were, in fact, because they were afraid that these things would come out.
And it's not like they weren't afraid even now.
A lot of all this stuff about getting John Yoo and the Justice Department and Cheney's deputy, you know, David Addington involved, was to, you know, to give themselves the bonafide as legal to, or a ticket to torture by saying it isn't torture, we're going to, we're going to purify it, or we're going to give it a different name, we're going to legalize it, because they knew that if it came out, they'd be in trouble.
So you can't cover up everything and they do feel, they do worry about these things in places like the CIA and the Department of Defense.
But they've been quite successful and Obama, sadly, in terms of political leadership, you know, has, you know, famously came up with the thing that you should, you know, we just need to get over it and move on, move on.
So nobody, you know, when Jose Rodriguez, who, by the way, is one of the defendants in this case, one of the four defendants said, you know, being sued by these torture survivors, and in one case, the family member of a torture survivor, that famously destroyed the videotapes of the interrogation, torture of Abu Zubaydah and another detainee known as al-Nashiri.
He was investigated and he was cleared, even though he deliberately, and even said, admitted that he destroyed these tapes, and he destroyed them because he felt that the outcry, you know, if people had seen them by the public would hurt the agency too much.
So you can destroy evidence in Obama's America and get away with it if you're with the CIA or you cry national security.
So as you're saying, the import of this case and what this judge did is he said, no, you know what, we're going to go forward with this suit.
And with this, the latest development, which is in this article that was at the McClatchy, is that furthermore, these people would have to testify at a deposition, as you would in a lawsuit, if anyone's ever been sued or involved in a suit, or maybe you've seen TV shows, you know, at some point, you know, the lawyers come together with the various witnesses, and they are deposed, they are in a sense, you know, questioned orally, and then a transcript is made.
And typically, the people are allowed to look at the transcript and make corrections.
And then that becomes part of the evidence in the trial, in the suit that's going forward.
But the government wanted to block that they didn't want, you know, they wanted it, well, you can submit questions, written questions, and we'll answer the written questions.
You know, they tried to get around it in various ways.
With one of the defendants, James Katsana, who was the deputy chief of the CTC, the Counter Intelligence Center, which was the people kind of running the torture, at least on operationally, they, you know, they just, they said they were admitted, and then you can, if you actually read the judges, you know, the description of what happened, the document link is at the article at McClatchy, you know, you'll see it says, like, he's, well, you know what, what's the point of an oral deposition, the CIA says, or the government says, because he's not going to answer any questions anyway.
So you're going to come all the way to Vermont, or wherever, Virginia, or wherever the hell he is, and you're going to say, you know, we're just going to say, sorry, I'm not going to answer.
And so it's a waste of your time.
So the judge didn't go for that.
And these guys are going to be orally deposed.
But I don't know exactly when that will be.
The trial itself is not set for sometime till next June.
So these things don't move quickly.
Now, let me ask you, do I understand right?
And again, you're that you're a psychologist who deals with torture victims and stuff.
And that's your expertise, not the legalities here.
But again, you're pretty good on this stuff.
Is it is it Mitchell and Jessen are the loophole because they're private contractors.
So they don't have quite as much sovereign immunity to get away with torturing people as the CIA guys.
But then once the case somehow goes through is sort of laundered through standing against Mitchell and Jessen, then we can get Jose Rodriguez from there.
I'm not sure exactly.
Do you know how it is that the CIA guys got included in this thing or whether if it hadn't have been for Mitchell and Jessen, could they have just gotten away with suing only Rodriguez and the CIA guys, for example?
Well, they the way the reason that these guys in this order for to be deposed came up was not by Suleyman Salim and the others who are suing.
It came up from Mitchell and Jessen themselves.
Mitchell and Jessen have called Jose Rodriguez, John Rizzo, James Katsana, Jonathan Fredman, who was a council.
Right.
They are the ones who were, you know, so actually the ACLU and these other people who are suing Mitchell and Jessen, they didn't they are not asking to depose the CIA guys.
Mitchell and Jessen are for their own defense.
Right.
Perfect.
Right.
This is exactly how it's supposed to work.
Right.
Is right.
You squeeze Mitchell and Jessen and you get them to point the finger at the people who told them that it was OK, and then you get squeeze them and you say, well, Jose Rodriguez, you want to go to prison or do you want to squeal on Dick Cheney?
And then you get him squealing on Dick Cheney, right?
Is it?
Is it?
That's the question, Scott.
I thought so initially, but I've looked at it more and I'm sorry to throw cold water.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
This is still just a civil case.
I'm way off the reservation here, man.
Let's.
No, no, no.
It may end up being that it may something there.
And I'm sure the people at the ACLU don't feel they're wasting their time.
And I do think it's worth going forward on this.
I really, really do.
Because once you get into a court setting, you know, we know that they're trying to get it at the truth.
But let's look at some other facts on the other side.
First of all, who's paying for James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen's defense?
The CIA, the U.S. government is right now.
Let's look at what's already happened in the case.
A stipulation has already been agreed to between the parties about the scope of what's called discovery.
And these depositions, by the way, are part of discovery.
Discovery is you're trying to find out what the hell's happened, what documents are out there, what you can get people to say before you go to trial.
And they made a stipulation, which is a legal agreement between the parties as to what the scope of that discovery would be.
Now, it's very interesting.
Two points I found very interesting about that.
One is that, and here's the part that one can get excited about, Scott.
One is that the discovery will focus on the actions or the roles, excuse me, of the defendants and others, and others, the two key words, in designing, promoting and, you know, putting together the methods alleged by the complainants, which, of course, are the torture, and then examining how that torture happened and what damages were done, of course.
But the main point is, and the key that the government hates, if you, you know, it's one thing to just say, OK, Mitchell and Jessen are the bad guys.
This is the way it's usually put in.
In fact, this article, sadly, never mentions that.
It's all about Mitchell and Jessen.
It's not all about Mitchell and Jessen.
I'm practically the only person saying this, and I'm not saying it because I'm a conspiracy buff.
I'm saying it because that's what's in the documents.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence put out their executive summary, and they said there were other people involved in designing this.
I've been saying from the get-go, who are they?
We know what department of the CIA they were in, and I made this point, too, it was published in Al Jazeera, America, that the people that they were, the other people helping Mitchell, or for all I know, leading Mitchell, that's what Mitchell says, came from the CIA's Department of Office of Technical Services, which was the same department that designed MKUltra experiments.
And experiments?
Well, you know, what do you mean experiments?
Well, you know, recently, the other major article that came out recently, which I'm not sure you're aware of, was in the Washington Post by Greg Miller.
And that article, a few, some months back, I don't know, maybe three or four months back, you know, the Washington Post published the contracts made by Mitchell and Jessen with the CIA for their enhanced interrogation program.
So what were Mitchell and Jessen hired for?
It's going to be in the contract.
Well, the contract said they were hired to do applied research.
And they were to design a program based on the theories of a famous U.S. psychologist by the name of Albert Bandura.
What?
What does this have?
Mitchell, I mean, Greg Miller, to give him his credit, he ferreted it out.
And he questioned, well, I don't know, what's this about?
Basically, he said, we don't know what it's about.
And this guy decided, what's his name again?
Albert Bandura, B-A-N-D-U-R-A.
This is the champion of torturing dogs to learn helplessness and all that?
That was another psychologist by the name of Martin Seligman.
The psychologists are all over this program, man.
Jonathan Fredman, who's being called to testify in this case, for instance, right, is married to a CIA psychologist by the name of Judy Philipson.
Judy Philipson worked with Kirk Hubbard.
Kirk Hubbard was the guy who was shepherding James Mitchell around all these different sites and kind of his sponsor in the world of psychology and brought him to the FBI and brought him to special meetings.
You know, so there's direct links between all these guys and Mitchell.
So Mitchell knows that Fredman, Katsana, they know a lot more than, and they want, you know, Mitchell and Justin essentially are saying, or at least saying, you know, if you're really going to push us to be the fall guys for everything, we're going to push back and say, and that comes out in that word, and others, we're going to push back and we're going to show that we were just part of a much larger thing, man.
Right.
And which we already all know so much about that this whole thing originated with Dick Cheney, the vice president, and his lawyer and buddy, David Addington, that they said, hey, let's do a torture program.
And that they, they like to say the CIA came to them and said, geez, we sure would like to torture people.
But we know that's not how it started.
I'm not sure.
I don't know.
I actually don't know.
I don't know how it started.
I think the CIA has been running experiments and I do think that that Cheney did want a torture program.
They ramped one up and that did happen, but that other things were happening at the same time.
All right, Charles Scott Horton here, and I got a great deal for you.
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Thanks.
Sure.
Oh yeah.
No, I mean, I don't mean to spin for them.
They've been torturing for decades as you say.
What they were doing I think had already started or they found this an opportune time to start it up.
Yeah.
And, um, and that's where, you know, you, well, and that's your other article here.
And again, here, the book is cover up at Guantanamo, everybody, uh, Jeff K find that at Amazon and at Guantanamo truth.com.
And that's where you have this thing documents on Guantanamo as America's battle lab.
That's in quotes here.
America's battle lab in the global war on terrorism.
So not just CIA black sites, but Guantanamo itself as a battle lab.
What do you mean by that?
Well, about, you know, that was a phrase used by a general working for the us army intelligence Colonel Custer.
I'm not a general.
Pardon me.
A Colonel Colonel Custer, like like Custer's last stand and um, you know, and others also, um, use that terminology, um, you know, like the, the former commandant at, uh, at Guantanamo, uh, or what, you know, some of them, and they would say, yeah, this is a battle lab.
What does that mean?
Well, a lab in military terms, sometimes it says it's a place, you know, military has its own language and they talk about lessons learned and, and they do in fact experiment with like putting, you know, different kinds of troops together, different kinds of scenarios.
In this case, the battle lab experiment had to do with things like exploiting the prisoners that they were going to get a battle lab in the war on terror.
And what I pointed out in an article just published only, I think at my, uh, at my own blog, which is known as Invictus, uh, but, uh, coming off of this, uh, CIA, uh, the discovery of Mitchell and Justin's contracts with the CIA that they were in fact hired to do research for the CIA that, uh, uh, based on a guy named Bandura, I said, well, what does Bandura have to do with interrogations discovered that there were plenty, there were writings already in the literature by military and CIA kinds of psychologists saying, well, yeah, we, we utilize the, the, um, theories of Bandura to help us understand how people can be flipped to become informers.
That's what they use it for.
So we've been saying myself, Jason Leopold, um, some, you know, years ago was working, we worked on this together, you know, that what were they doing with these prisoners?
Is it just, was it all about intelligence?
And that's how it's still framed by the mainstream press.
It's like, does torture produce reliable intelligence?
Well, that's a very important discussion to have, but it wasn't, it doesn't really, it unfortunately limits what was this program even about?
It wasn't just about producing intelligence, good or bad.
It was about getting false confessions, about setting up people for show trials.
And most importantly, and very least discussed, finding what people you could get to work as double agents or flip them or make them informants, you know, to make, you know, to make them assets for you.
That's how the Cold War worked, by the way.
Well, and get them to implicate Saddam Hussein.
Yeah.
Well, as an example, that was what they did with Al-Libi, right?
And Zubaydah too?
We don't know.
We don't know enough.
I thought it was on the record that Zubaydah had also implicated Iraq.
I just read that pretty recently, I think.
Oh, okay.
Well, yeah.
No, certainly they got, I'm sorry.
Yes.
I thought I was thinking about flipping him.
No.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I just mean saying, oh yeah, Saddam taught us all kinds of things.
He's our good buddy.
Yeah.
He got these people under torture, you know, to implicate and say a whole bunch of different things.
Oh, really?
Now, I'm sorry.
I wouldn't wear that.
They got KSM to implicate Saddam Hussein as well?
No, not Saddam.
Just other scenarios.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, they had him taking credit for, you know, everything, for the sinking of the Lusitania and every tragedy since.
Yeah.
Yes.
Right.
I mean, that's slightly hyperbolic, but so is his statement.
But Scott, I wanted to go back to something about this trial that you're listening, that's very important also when I looked into it.
So are we really going to get more from this trial?
Let's look at one other aspect of the stipulation made about how discovery would go.
And one of the main things is that they, all parties agreed, all parties, that would include the ACLU-backed complainants, that the CIA would have, so a lot of this protest about, oh, we don't want them to be deposed.
Okay.
Now they're going to be deposed.
Oh, too bad.
But actually, the CIA is going to have representatives at all these depositions, and those representatives can interrupt at any time to say, this person can't say something.
It's national security.
In other words, they're there to censor the deposition, and that's going to be allowed.
Right?
Yep.
I could read you the language from the order if you wanted, I'd have to dig it up a little bit.
But the main point is- Now, that's not usually how it works, right?
I mean, wouldn't they just have, I mean, the lawyers would have to have clearance, and then they'd go back and censor it later, right, or not?
No.
People are allowed to have attorneys there at depositions, and an attorney might say, wait a second, or I need to consult with my attorney.
But in this case, it's the CIA's attorney, separate from Rodriguez's.
In this case, it's representatives of the CIA, right, will be there.
And so they say, so Jose Rodriguez, tell us what you did, you know, how you organized, you know, how you told James Mitchell, you know, to write up a plan to torture people, let's say.
I'm not saying Jose Rodriguez did, I don't know who's the one who did.
And the, I'm just saying, for instance, you know, then the CIA could say, you know what, this is a classified matter as to how this, we can't talk about this.
Okay, let's move on.
And that's it.
So how much is really going to come out of this depositions?
Basically with the ACLU and the complainants are hoping is that they know they're not going to get everything they want.
You know, you get the people in a situation, you hope you get at least something.
And that's what, you know, so it's still worth it.
Who knows what might slip out?
Who knows what the government feels constrained to admit?
You know, maybe they'll come in and just stonewall everything as they're suggesting that James Katsana is going to do, a name that's not very well known.
I googled him, in fact, after reading this article, because I had not heard of him.
And it's almost, you almost find nothing out there about him.
But he was a major CIA figure for decades, and was very much involved with the with the people who are, you know, organizing the torture program.
You know, I can't know exactly what he did.
And neither, of course, do the people in this trial, they're trying to find out.
But But anyway, so I think, you know, guarded, you know, very, you know, one could have very guarded optimism that something good will come out, it's obviously good that a judge has stood up against government pressure to to keep people from from being sued, or testifying.
That's all to the good.
And it certainly makes these people quake a little bit in their boots, but they've got a lot of more cards to draw on.
And you know, the fact for me, the standpoint that the media does not limits themselves the discussion.
Maybe they do this through CIA assets themselves.
But anyway, but the mainstream media limiting the discussion, not, for instance, talking about the aspect of the illegal experimentation that went on, which, by the way, goes beyond a war crime to something known as a crime against humanity.
Torture is a war crime.
Illegal experimentation on prisoners, prisoners are as is a or just human experimentation on prisoners is a crime against humanity, right?
It's a step up.
Of course, that's based on law that America has made into international law over the world more than any other state.
Yeah, it was part of the Geneva Convention.
Now, attorneys will tell you that back in 2006, you know, the United States changed its laws to a certain extent about this.
And I think if I remember correctly, what they did is they only the president of the United States can determine what is what will be the party who can determine whether or not something is a crime against humanity.
So instead of recognize, you know, and by the way, another crime against humanity is aggressive war in the United States certainly is guilty of that in Iraq.
I mean, there's just so many ways in which we have a very criminal government, government rather that was run by criminals and those who cover up for criminals.
I would say Libya is the same thing.
I'm sorry for all the good and all it was to have a black president and all those things.
It means, you know, I would say Barack Obama is also guilty of aggressive war in Libya.
And you could make a case, of course, in backing in the other places where the US is intervening.
But Libya, I'd say is the clearest case.
Well, of course, the joke there is that, well, gee, the U.N. Security Council voted.
And so it's perfectly fine to launch an aggressive war.
It's not criminal at all, as long as you get France and Russia and China to agree.
Yeah, well, you know, and by the way, first black president, boy, was he bad for the blacks of Libya.
Nobody ever talks about that.
How Barack Obama is basically the David Duke of Libya, the leader, the imperial grand wizard of their KKK and all their mass pogroms against black Africans that were falsely implicated as all somehow being agents of Gaddafi when Obama's al-Qaeda forces took over that place.
Yeah.
It's a very uncovered story.
But it's true.
I mean, I even talked to David Enders, the great war correspondent, when he had written for McClatchy back in late 2011 or early 2012 about being in a refugee camp where the jihadis would come and rape the women every night.
And, you know, they use mass rape as a big fake excuse to launch that war based on a bunch of nothing.
But then one of the results was very real mass rapes by the people that America had fought for and overthrown Gaddafi in favor of.
Yeah.
But anyway, I think that's legal, though, right?
Al-Qaeda guys, you know, working for American special forces, killing and raping people.
Is there a law that prevents that as long as it's in Africa?
Well, you know, many, many years ago, going back to the Vietnam War days, a famous author, Joseph Heller, wrote a book called Catch 22.
Yeah.
And various times in the book that there's a definite catch.
Twenty two was a supposedly a term for a legalistic thing in military law that, you know, is defined at various times in the book in a satirical fashion.
But at the end of the book, the last time it's defined is after the main character of the book, Yossarian discovers that the U.S. had committed a war atrocity and he's talking to somebody.
I think it's a woman in the book and who and who survived.
He says, what happened here?
He says, they came through.
They killed all these people.
He goes, how could they do that?
That's that's illegal.
It is.
Well, actually, they came up to me.
I said the same thing to them.
You can't do this.
And he says, we can.
And she said, why?
And the guys, the military guy said, catch 22, catch 22.
Catch 22 means we can do whatever the hell we want to do.
And that's how it is.
If you're the big numero uno military imperialist force on the planet, who's going to stop you?
Right.
And that's why they really hate.
Not that these regimes are perfect by any means, but that's why they hate Russia and China so much or places like Iran, which are even much weaker because or even little upstart states like North Korea, because they don't march to the U.S. tune.
If you don't march to the U.S. tune, then you must be against us.
And we want to, you know, rule the planet.
I mean, it's pretty horrible stuff.
And Americans are lost, are lost in their, you know, partly just in surviving their own lives.
They're lost in the lies that the media puts out and the half truths.
They're lost by their own identifications with military might and glory to make their own small lives feel grand and better.
And they're also lost in the way in which they are, you know, the reality of the world is hidden from them by the media and by the government, of course.
And you know, people like you and me and there's others obviously trying to speak out, trying to say the truth.
But it's very hard.
And we live in very dangerous times.
And it's very frightening to think where sooner or later these people in their hubris, and it's already happened in other ways, I mean, it was hubris what they did in Vietnam and for all the millions of people killed there.
But even in the, you know, they mistook and they stubbed their toes badly.
And there were, you know, tens of thousands of people, you know, Americans who also died as a result of American overreach and crimes.
And there were hundreds of thousands, if not millions affected as well, either through injuries or deaths to family members.
And it's also widely believed, I was reading lately that even the casualty figures in terms of deaths in the Vietnam Wars of Americans is underreported.
And that more died than the government has admitted on that Vietnam wall.
So I know we live in terrible times.
This is the torture thing, you know.
So people are fighting, they're clawing away.
The people fighting this legal case are clawing away.
People like me writing about what really happened inside of Guantanamo with the deaths of certain detainees and the cover up about, you know, destruction of evidence and what maybe really happened there, you know, put out our books.
But and I hope people listening here feel not overwhelmed, but been inspired to talk to a family member or a friend or write something themselves or mention it on Facebook or do whatever we can, because it is really important that the truth get out there, because if we let this government and its actions just continue without any opposition, then we drift into a place that's very, very, very bad and very dangerous.
Wars against China and Russia, for instance, would be totally so beyond anything that the citizens of the United States have experienced in their lifetimes, that if assuming even people survive such a conflict, that people in future generations will will curse us for having blindly gone into such an inferno.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
I mean, assuming they don't get as completely destroyed in Great Power War.
Yeah.
And just to try to end on a little bit of a positive note, the other Scott Horton, as I call him, he's probably the actual Scott Horton and I'm just me.
But anyway, the no, it's the other way around.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The heroic anti-torture international human rights lawyer, writer for Harper's and law professor at Columbia and all that.
He likes to say that, hey, man, guess what?
Look at all these tin pot mirrored sunglasses, dictatorships down in Latin America who have put in their war criminals on trial.
If they can do it, we can do it.
And George Bush, he's still only what, in his mid 60s or something like that.
He absolutely could be put in prison and this ain't over yet.
And I mean, in a way it sounds kind of naive.
But on the other hand, assuming that the direction of the wind blowing can change, then why not?
Any prosecutor ought to be able to get ahead big time by putting a bunch of at least let's start with the lawyers.
Right.
Let's indict Judge Bybee and John Yoo and see what what kind of noises they make there.
We put them in the dock and get this thing rolling.
You know, why not?
It's a great idea.
I'll tell you, there's a it's a great idea.
But you know, there hasn't been a prosecutor willing to take on the U.S. national security establishment since Jim Garrison.
And we know what happened to him.
And Argentina and the United States are different in this very important way.
And here I can draw upon the fact that before becoming a psychologist, you know, I was a history major in college, did thesis in history.
You know, Argentina is a weak state compared to the United States.
It doesn't have the same kind of institutional weight and weight, but strength that the United States has.
And so it's it's you know, it it's one of the reasons, of course, why that state apparatus, you know, felt it had to go to domestic terror, you know, and disappear tens of thousands of its citizens whose testimony to its sense of threat and weakness.
Now, the fact that things flip later and people decades later could come to power who could prosecute that is great.
But the United States has does not seem to have very much political wiggle room.
Just look at the current election.
Who are our choices?
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
That's testimony to the fact that that other people and other points of view have great difficulty getting heard or pushing through.
On the other hand, a lot of what you're saying and the other Scott Horton is saying, there obviously are to be positive on some level signs that things can push through.
There was the Occupy movement for a while as disorganized as it was.
There were the people who, right or wrong, nevertheless, got were very inspired by the idea of change who were involved in the promoting Bernie Sanders, right?
And I'm not speaking as whether Sanders is good or bad.
What I'm talking about, though, is that people felt inspired Occupy movement or Sanders to get involved in the political process who weren't involved before.
And the last time anything like that really happened in a big way was the 1960s and early 70s.
And, you know, maybe, you know, it will take something of that type or even stronger to make the kinds of changes or get, you know, the accountability on people like George Bush.
I mean, can you imagine if George Bush were if a prosecutor today put George Bush inside and indicting him, the full weight of the state would come down on that person, right?
And it would take only the American people, the American people would have to rally to defend and support such a person.
Unfortunately, that did not happen in the case of Jim Garrison, right?
Instead, what you had is they came down against him with all the might that the media could.
And they did a similar thing when Oliver Stone put out the movie JFK, right?
Just look at the shitstorm that raised.
But so you can it would be that tripled or more if an actual prosecutor came out.
But anyway, no one seems to have that level of courage.
And I'm not it could happen.
I mean, much stranger things in history have happened.
And an example of a fight, by the way, a movie, a Roman Polanski is coming out with a movie I was happy to see on the Dreyfus affair.
I don't know if you're familiar with the Dreyfus affair, your listeners are was the biggest political scandal of the 19th century.
At the end of the day, in fact, it went into the 20th century.
It was the case of a French Jewish army officer who was charged with treason for giving up documents to the to the enemy, which was Germany.
And totally anti Semitism was huge.
This is where Emile Zola became famous with Jacques, I accuse.
And it's a great case because it shows that over, you know, fighting you could really what happened was fighting to get to the truth there brought down the French government because it turned out that it was a total lie and they were hiding their own cover up that they knew all along who the person was.
But he was a hot, you know, a friend of the he was a member of the ruling class, essentially.
And they covered it up and they deliberately prosecuted an innocent person and sent them to Devil's Island in torture.
But that ultimately came out because people kept fighting and fighting and fighting to get out the truth.
I think that's why probably Polanski wants to say, you know, there's going to be a political edge to this movie, which is apropos to what we're trying to do and what this judge maybe is doing and what you're doing.
What I'm doing is if you keep fighting to be optimistic there, you can actually succeed.
It's not it's not hopeless.
So I hope that I'm saying this in part to correct my pessimism from before it or I wouldn't do this if I didn't believe that it that it's not hopeless, that if you keep fighting, but it does take ultimately people, regular people to enter the field and to push for the truth to happen.
Just as really, I think regular people getting involved in the what's happening up in North Dakota, you know, with the Native Americans has made that come into more national attention.
So regular people have to become involved.
All right, so that is Jeffrey Kaye.
You find him at Guantanamo truth dot com.
His great book cover up at Guantanamo, the NCIS investigation into the, quote, suicides of Mohammed al-Hanashi and Abdul Rahman al-Amri.
Thank you very much for coming back on the show, dude.
I sure do appreciate it.
Thanks so much, Scott.
All right, y'all.
And that's the Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at Libertarian Institute dot org slash Scott Horton Show.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State and the War State.
Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War Two.
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