04/30/15 – John Whitehead – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey, I'm Scott.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Next up is John Whitehead.
He writes a hell of a lot of great essays at rutherford.org, the site of the Rutherford Institute, which he runs.
And his previous book was The Government of Wolves, and the brand new one is called Battlefield America, The War on the American People.
And hey, it's got a foreword by Ron Paul.
Nice.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey, fine, sir.
Thanks for having me on.
Very happy to have you on.
So I'm interested a little bit, anyway, in this Jade Helm thing.
Obviously, a hell of a big deal has been made out of it.
But so can we start with just the facts?
What exactly is Jade Helm?
Well, it's a military exercise.
They're running in eight states, starting July 15th.
I think it's going to go for seven weeks.
You can see places like Texas or Afghanistan for the troops to train.
In fact, I live here in Virginia, and they do those same kind of exercises, the SEAL here.
They've been doing them for years, openly.
So you can see the troops, and here are the airplanes going over your house and shaking your house and things like that.
These exercises have been going on openly since the 1980s.
You can go on your websites.
I mentioned it in my new book, Battlefield America.
There was an exercise at Ronald Reagan with Rumsfeld and Cheney.
They ran called Rex 84, with a supposedly 100,000 dissidents they'd have to round up in time of a national emergency.
My own opinion on these things, they're so open now, they're through Florida.
I mean, some local police in different states are actually driving around now in armored vehicles and camouflaged outfits.
I think that we're slowly being acclimated to a possibility of a martial law state.
I don't know if you saw recently in a small town in California, the National Guard was marching through the streets.
They called it community outreach, doing drills.
It seems like we've got a few different things here that may or may not be exactly the same thing.
I mean, the Rex 84 thing was, right, if we invade Nicaragua and there's a bunch of left-wing and Latino protesters, we'll round all them up and put them in camps and all this kind of thing, and suspend the Constitution to do so, apparently.
But now, so these training exercises, I mean, it sure sounds like it's a hell of a big deal.
Eight states.
It's a huge training exercise.
A lot of money, yeah.
A lot of planning.
But their story that, well, we're practicing for killing Arabs.
We've got Iraq War III coming up here.
Is that not the obvious explanation of what's going on here?
Well, it may be the obvious.
I don't know.
I mean, I'm not at the top with the generals who meet with the continuity of government groups and stuff like that.
They do exist.
It's what the Washington Post called our shadow government.
There's about, between 100 and 150 individuals, supposedly, will take over in time of an emergency.
Supposedly, they coordinate with these activities with the White House and Department of Defense.
So listen, ladies and gentlemen, I'm a 40-year civil liberties trainer.
I worked in and out of D.C. through a lot of politicians.
It's difficult to know exactly what's going on right now.
But I would say keep an eye on it, see what happens.
I don't think, at this time, we need to run for the hills, no, unless there's something there that I'm not seeing.
But what it seems to be doing, it'll acclimate a lot of people to the idea that the military can march through your streets.
But if you read the Founding Fathers, they would be pretty freaked out by it.
Well, just on the most basic level, it's dangerous to be flying Black Hawk helicopters around doing these drills in American cities.
Well, they fly overseas.
People complain.
I've had people call me and say their houses are shaking, those kind of things.
The National Guard, in some states, doing exercises against an extremist enemy, and the extremist enemy turns out to be gun owners.
There is a mentality that there is a group of Americans out there, and I see it, I mean, I've been dealing with some SWAT team members and other people that talk to me.
There is a mentality, there is a dangerous group of Americans that could uprise at any moment.
That may be true, but I don't see that.
By the way, the FBI statistics, recently released about a year ago, show that crime in America among citizens is a 40-year low.
The murder rate in 2013 was the lowest in a century in this country, and unarmed cops getting killed, I mean, cops getting killed in the line of duty is at a 50-year low.
So I don't see Americans running around blasting people away.
The only people I see going down that aren't armed are by people that work for the government.
The statistics don't, why they would spend all this money doing this in eight states, and again, there's very little accountability.
There was a recent report showing that billions of dollars that the Pentagon has been spending overseas is totally unaccounted for.
They don't even know where it goes.
Oh yeah, no, they never did.
To be honest with you, I had a former, I won't say what branch of the service, but he met with me not too long ago.
He was a high-up officer.
He said that he left the service because of the cash that he saw being handed out in Afghanistan to people of that country, and whoever they were, he said that was one of them.
The second thing was driving by opium fields and seeing American troops guarding them.
That's what he told me, I don't know if that's the truth, but he left the service, he said, because of that.
Oh sure.
There's plenty of reporting along those lines.
But I have to say this.
I don't think anybody's, there's no one running, whoever's running the show, there's no accountability.
They're milking us dry with money like this.
These exercises, do you really need to do it in eight states?
Yeah, I mean, that's, I think, the question.
I mean, you look at Fort Hood, it's the size of Austin.
I mean, it's huge.
There's plenty of training ground.
I was an infantry officer.
I served at Fort Hood.
Yeah, there you go.
So you tell me.
There's plenty of training ground.
Oh yes.
At American military bases.
All the training exercises I did, I was an army officer, infantry officer.
I guess the only reason, if I sound a little skeptical at all about this, it's just, I've heard all of this all before in the 1990s, and I thought they were going way too far back then, and there was collateral damage, you know, where they shot through a restaurant's window and almost killed some people one night, and I think that one was in Florida, and you know, I think flying the Black Hawks around are really dangerous and all that.
But as far as the martial law scare, I mean, we saw that really what they were training for was Iraq.
I mean, they were training for fighting urban warfare in Arabia and using San Antonio as a stand-in for that.
I mean, and that's, to me, what this looks like is, you know, they got to be trained in order to be, you know, effective killers.
And so if we're sending the army back to Mosul, the new generation of young guys in there, they got to know how to rappel out of a Black Hawk, or whatever the task is, right?
I was the infantry officer.
We did a pretty good job of training them at Fort Hood without doing huge exercises.
I think there's a lot of money going on here.
I mean, for example, all this military equipment going to local police, and you have to put that in conjunction with the military exercises.
You have a very militarized police, but the original rumor floated out there that all this equipment going to local police was old equipment out of Afghanistan, blah, blah, blah.
We did a research, over 40% of it's brand new.
So I talked to a few people that work out of Washington, and they say, yeah, man, some of these corporations are making a killing off this stuff.
They're making it just to make money.
And you'll find out a lot of that stuff that you're seeing the military using and all this, there's a profit motive driven by people that have a lot of influence in Washington, D.C.
But we don't have that kind of influence, by the way.
Yeah, I mean, even like some of the scariest ones where like, wow, all the sheriffs are buying bayonets and right down to the post office and the Social Security Administration, they're arming themselves.
I mean, to me, this is all just corporate welfare, right?
This is just a deal for bullets.
Yeah, a lot of money, making a lot of dough, and there's no accountability is what I'm saying.
Again, I know it.
I've sued politicians, I've seen reports, I've done depositions.
Washington, D.C. is a very corrupt institution.
And James Madison, who wrote the Bill of Rights, he gave us the thing we should be most concerned about.
He said we ought to, this is exactly what, we ought to mistrust all those in power.
And the reason you do that, only good citizens do that.
And good citizens question government, they ask questions, and there are some paranoid folks out there, but as someone recently told me, paranoia means you're perceptive, and that may be true as well.
Right.
And you know, there's just no denying that when you put it all together the way you often do in these articles, that, you know, hey, here's 75 shocking facts about what the government's been up to lately.
And here's the key, you can't, I mean, people, you'll have a tough time resisting, they're armed to the teeth.
So watch if you're one of those groups that wants to charge some militarized police unit, watch out.
Yep.
All right, well hey, thanks for coming back on the show, appreciate it.
Thank you, sir.
All right.
I'm Mike Whitehead, everybody's at rutherford.org.
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