12/28/12 – Joey King – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, so welcome back to the show.
We got Joey King on the line from Veterans for Peace.
How are you doing, Joey?
Happy New Year.
I'm doing well, sir.
Happy New Year to you.
So what do you guys have planned for 2013 over there at veteransforpeace, veteransforpeace.org?
Oh, we have lots of stuff, many, many things.
A lot of things that come up in the middle of the year that you're not planning on and you have to react.
I think probably one of the things we're looking into now is the recent announcement by the Pentagon that they're going to deploy troops into Africa in a way that we really haven't seen before.
Going to take a normal brigade, you know, not like a special forces unit or anything, and let them train African troops.
And I think it's something like 35 countries.
So trying a new tactic on us that we hadn't really seen before.
So I think we have a statement on our website or should have one later on today about that.
So I don't know how much you've heard about that, but it's kind of an interesting development.
There was a thing in Defense News about a month ago, maybe a little more, about the Dagger Brigade.
You know, like you stab somebody in the back with.
And I think they said it was just part of the 3rd Infantry Division.
And in so many words, we're looking for work.
Now that we've been downsized out of Iraq and Afghanistan, we're looking for ways to stay globally engaged.
They're picking up on the Democrat newspeak for getting the job here.
And they said, you know, here's a place where we could go and collect paychecks and maybe get fancy ribbons for our clothes.
That's exactly right.
It is an interesting new tactic because this type of thing had been, you know, pretty much the domain of the Green Berets since they were founded in the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s.
That's always been their bailiwick, has been training in foreign countries, counterinsurgency-type operations.
And, you know, this is an interesting new tactic.
And I'm always leery about it when I hear of training, one, because we know what that means, and two, it's never as the Pentagon pitches it because of the language barrier, for one thing.
I know there's a lot of countries in Africa that speak English or French as a first or second language, but it's a really, really complex issue when you start talking about different cultures and different languages.
How does one train them?
It becomes a lot more.
And once you let them get into that country, whichever country of the 35 it is, it's sort of the camel's nose under the tent.
Right, because, I mean, I guess historically it's never hard to bribe some third-world colonels with weapons.
Do what we say and we'll arm you to the teeth.
We'll teach you how to kill all your own people who dare resist.
It'll be great.
Well, it has been a little harder in Africa because of the colonial history and a lot of bad taste in people's mouths.
When they first came up with the idea of AFRICOM a few years ago, they had a really, really, really difficult time getting a country to host it.
And Djibouti, which is a former French colony, was the only one that they could get anyone country to agree to host it.
But I don't think they're really hosting much in Djibouti as far as I understand.
Yeah, no, the headquarters, I think, is still in Germany, yeah.
Yeah, I've got a friend who is teaching English in Djibouti and she says she never runs into any American troops at all.
I like you.
I think on paper that it might have said that they were going to do something in Djibouti, but in reality I don't think they've actually done very much for that.
Well, the word is that they have an air base there, flying drones and F-15s for killing Yemenis and Somalis with.
They can probably run a lot of drones out of just about any place.
They don't need a lot of runway or anything like that.
Yeah, there's some islands right around there too.
I forgot the name of them, but right there near the port of Aden or Gulf of Aden.
Yes, it's in that neck of the woods.
All right, yeah, so yeah, you're right though.
There is a legacy of, well, colonialism wasn't that long ago and so neocolonialism is still a pretty hard sell there.
But I guess, of course, it doesn't matter what the hell the people of Africa want.
I mean, if the people of Raytheon want to sell some drones, they're going to get them sold.
That's a good point.
It's a very lucrative business.
As Smedley Butler said in the 1930s, war is a racket, and it's been that way since time immemorial, unfortunately.
All right, now, so when it comes to opposing this kind of thing, what is it that you envision Veterans for Peace will be doing?
You're going to host conferences?
You're going to organize protests at your congressman's office or host a teach-in?
Or what is the dang deal here?
Probably one of the key things we'll be doing upcoming is a lot of our chapters will be marching in Martin Luther King Day parades, I'm sure, because that would be a good opportunity to raise awareness with a sympathetic audience.
So I think that's sort of our initial game plan on it, besides the statement and the letter-writing campaigns and that kind of thing.
So I know a lot of chapters are going to be doing that, and that's something that we can all support.
And a lot of the folks in the African-American community, or people who would sympathize with folks in the African-American community, would be very amazed to learn how many countries in Africa we will soon be in.
Yeah, well, and are already bombing, you know?
It's terrible.
Yes, a lot of that goes on in Yemen.
They've killed a couple of quote-unquote militants within the last few days in Yemen.
Who knows if they really are militants or if they're just a couple of people who happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Yeah, well, there's a lot of that even officially.
You know, foreignpolicy.com has a piece all about the collateral damage in one of these recent drone strikes and the blowback from it.
Yeah, that's a tough thing for the Pentagon and the CIA and the powers that be to ever factor that into the equation until it's already happened.
You know, 9-11 was a blowback from the Afghanistan things in the 80s, and nobody put it together for 10 or 12 years, and then all of a sudden, oh, well, that's blowback.
We were talking about this on Ernie Hancock's show this morning about how David Gregory on Meet the Press asked Leon Panetta, hey, you know, we keep reading that you kill some innocents in Yemen accidentally trying to get a bad guy, and then you create 10 new enemies, and they all want to join al-Qaeda now, so is it possible?
I mean, can you imagine this is on Meet the Press finally after a dozen years of this.
Is it possible that our policy is counterproductive?
And Leon Panetta said, hey, look, these are the tools we have, and so we have to use them, and that's it.
And so if there's a bad guy, yes, we will kill him, even knowing that it creates 10 new bad guys.
We're still going to kill him, and then we'll just kill them too, and even if that creates 100 new bad guys, we'll just kill them too, and then 1,000, and on, you know, up your parabola.
Yeah, it's still Martin Luther King line about violence only leads to a never-ending upward spiral of violence.
Yep.
In fact, when Adam Yauch, the Beastie Boy, died, people were passing around.
He was like the most activist, one of them, I guess.
And people were passing around a clip of him in 1998 when Bill Clinton was bombing Sudan and Afghanistan over the embassies, and Adam Yauch was saying, you know what, this is not the right way to handle this.
You're just going to – everybody claims retaliation every time they do something, and you can just make it worse and worse and worse, and we've got to be the bigger man and stop the violence now.
That's exactly right.
There's some great Ron Paul quotes from 1997 and 1998 like that too.
We're going to provoke a terrorist attack on our own country now.
Sure, sure.
And, you know, back when I joined ROTC in 1980, it was because Iran had taken over our embassy, and no one ever told me until years and years and years later that the CIA, with Norman Schwarzkopf Sr.and Teddy Roosevelt – or excuse me, Kermit Roosevelt Jr.
– had basically did a coup d'etat out of our embassy, and that was a blowback for it.
I never got that memo until many years later.
But the Pentagon and the CIA just have a tough time factoring in the blowback.
It's not a good policy, and they just never factor it in for some reason.
Well, I mean, I don't know.
It's always a constant dilemma, right, whether the bottom line is stupidity or the plan, and, of course, the stupidity works out real well for them.
Since World War I, everything that they do is wrong, and it only creates the terrible consequences that become the excuse for their next intervention, and they can chase the war in Iraq to Libya, to Mali, to Nigeria, and loop all the way back down and meet the guys hunting Kony down in Uganda if they want to.
You know, they can just keep on going.
What's stopping them?
Sure, exactly.
Just borders mean nothing.
You have a drone, you fly it over there and violate another country's sovereignty and, you know, have all sorts of different statistics, but there's certainly, no matter which statistic you read except the Pentagon, there's a significant amount of innocent civilians that get killed in these drone strikes.
And I think the Africans probably, you know, if I'm guessing with this AFRICOM thing that we were talking about a couple of minutes ago, I'm suspecting that it won't take much of that to start getting the U.S. run out of a lot of these countries.
And, you know, somebody's going to start developing drones and using them on us or hacking into that drone and flying our own drones into us or something along those lines, and I don't think anyone's accounting for that.
You know, they invented the Gatlin gun because they said it was such a terrible weapon that it would end the Civil War.
That's what Dr. Gatlin did when he invented the Civil War, and it didn't.
They just figured out ways around it and then figured out ways around ways around and so forth.
So it's just insanity.
Yeah.
Well, you know, that is one thing.
I think you're really onto something there about the danger of being spread so thin, right?
Because it's not really like the British Raj.
It is a kind of neo-colonialism where you have these lily pads of military bases all around the world.
That's what Donald Rumsfeld called them.
And, really, they're all very vulnerable, aren't they?
Yes.
You know, I mean, you could really have a couple of bad weeks that result in the empire being pretty well rolled up.
It could definitely roll that part of it up because, you know, people just don't like a drone flying in the sky and out of nowhere killing their father or their daughter or something.
It's just not a—because you can't tell.
And the Pentagon has never figured this out.
Guerrillas started figuring out after World War II that all we have to do is not wear uniforms, and they can't tell us from an ordinary civilian.
And we've never really been able to deal with that.
I mean, I was an infantryman, and in the infantry we were supposed to identify and kill the enemy.
Well, if you can't identify the enemy—I mean, this goes back to the invention of the bow and arrow or the spear.
First thing you have to do is identify the enemy, and if you can't identify the enemy, then you've got a real problem, and those drones just don't do a good job of it.
I guess on the positive side, you know, at least it's not a carpet bomb, but it's certainly not a good tactic.
It was better than carpet bombing, but it's not much better.
Well, you know, I don't really know too much about putting myself in those people's shoes in that circumstance, but I do remember reading about the Americans being bombed by the remote-controlled landmines in Iraq, the homemade landmines, IEDs and EFPs and what have you there, and how frustrating it was for them to have nobody to shoot at, to be at war with ghosts, and how a lot of times they end up killing whoever happens to be nearby.
Sometimes Lieutenant Colonel Kozlars orders them to kill whoever happens to be nearby when something like this happens.
But that's got to be the most frustrating thing in the whole world.
I can't imagine it's much different when you're talking about being bombed to death by robots all the time, where even if you could shoot one down, there's not even a single pilot risking his life up there.
You know, he's hiding 10,000 miles away.
But then that technology finds its way into a hacker or to, you know, Chinese or whomever, and the technology gets away from you fairly quickly.
The first one that gets shot down, you know, a lot of that technology can be very easily, you know, in the right hands compromised.
So it's a real issue with that type of thing.
And, you know, with the IEDs, nowhere in the Pentagon plans were they ever figuring on IEDs.
They just weren't.
And those MRAPs that they invented, a friend of mine who just recently passed away a couple of months ago, was a full colonel, still on active duty, and he was telling me back in the spring that they had devised a World War I-like grenade to defeat the MRAP because the way you could throw up a grenade with a parachute attached to it, and that would fall into the MRAP and take it out.
So, you know, no one's planning on this World War I technology or a television remote being able to detonate a bomb to be able to knock something offline.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, we've got to go because Thomas Mountain is coming up next.
In fact, we're already late.
Can you talk real quick again about Veterans for Peace and how people can join and what's the website and all that?
Sure.
It's www.veteransforpeace.org, and we'd love to have you if you're a veteran.
And if you're not a veteran, we do have associate memberships.
We'd love to have you either way.
All right.
Great.
Hey, thanks so much, Joey.
Talk to you again soon.
Happy New Year.
All right, brother.
Happy New Year to you.
Bye-bye.
Everybody, that's Joey King from the Veterans for Peace.
We'll be right back.
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