I'm 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 the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, first time in a long time here.
On the line, Adam Kokesh.
How are you doing, Adam?
Outstanding.
It's an honor to be interviewed by the legendary Scott Horton.
Yeah, yeah.
Anyway, so you guys know Adam.
He was a Marine in Iraq War II, and then he joined Iraq Veterans Against the War, and he had a show on RT, Adam Versus the Man, and is that still the name of your YouTube show now, Adam Versus the Man, or not?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, oh, man.
I'm so past YouTube.
Oh, my gosh.
It is GovTube now.
I'm a big fan of Odyssey and Telegram and anything that's decentralized and blockchain based.
I built my channel up to 100 plus million views and quarter million subs, and it's a weird thing to say.
It should be a lot more, but just over the last seven or eight years, the shadow banning on YouTube and the direct censorship where I basically am not allowed to talk about COVID, it's obscene, and I'm glad that the internet is evolving to the point where I can connect with people directly.
I think Telegram is a big, big tool for that.
Yeah.
I mean, sooner or later, I don't know what's taking so long, but sooner or later, all of these Twitter.com and Facebook.com is all going to cease to exist, and everything's just going to be a standalone app that has blockchain interaction, whatever this is.
I don't know the code, but you know what I mean.
It's going to all be like that.
Yes.
A decentralized protocol for social media communications that you can control your connections to.
And see, this is why I think Telegram needs to evolve a little bit more.
It started as a charity project, essentially, sponsored by someone who just wanted to pay for it because he wanted it to exist.
And it became like a good private, secure, I mean, as secure as you can be with an app to begin with, kind of messaging app that was great for groups.
But when a lot of the alt writers and Chris Cantwell types got banned on social media like four or five years ago, they went to Telegram because you can have channels also that people can just follow.
So mine is t.me slash Adam versus the man.
And I want people to follow me there.
I really believe that that might be the big, not the ultimate transition you describe, which I do believe in, that there's going to be a decentralized blockchain social media protocol.
But until then, and what's going to be good for a long time, and I think is harder for them to sabotage right now is Telegram.
And I'm very hopeful for Odyssey as well as a potential bridge out of this really choked off, censored.
I mean, it's just like we went through the Internet's infancy, and then there was a golden age when I was active and building my channel, and it got really big.
I was doing 2 million views a month pretty consistently and getting paid $6,000 on YouTube before it got bought by Google.
And then it was all downhill for me and a lot of other independent media producers.
And so we went from that Internet golden age of independent media to this very censored controlled phase that I hope is coming to a breaking point around all the COVID bullshit.
And that this transition using Telegram, using Odyssey, and I'm not being paid and I'm not endorsing them, but I think that those kinds of apps and platforms are going to be a very critical bridge right now.
Yeah.
Hey, that's cool.
And I got to tell you, man, I got five thousand five hundred something interviews I've been posting since 2003, and I've always been way like years behind the curve on getting them out, you know, versus, you know, out by way of the podcasting and getting my archive up on YouTube and all the different things.
I'm years behind the tech on all that, so I need to talk to my guy about that.
But anyways, hey, listen, you're here because I was on Dave's show and we were talking about why we let soldiers off the hook a little bit from our scorn compared to cops.
And the way I remember it, you did not object that cops are wonderful.
It was just that the soldiers, in fact, contrary to what I was saying and I guess Dave was agreeing that they can't really quit or at least it's much more difficult for them to quit, certainly compared to a cop.
And how that is kind of one of the factors that makes us kind of hold it against them less that they're doing even more violent action on behalf of the state.
And of course, we're also bringing up other factors like kids are recruited very young before they know anything.
And, you know, cops are picking on their own people in their own towns, which is the extra layer of despicable, even if the night raid is not quite as violent, things like that.
But anyway, so you objected and said, hey, that's not right.
You can quit the military if you want.
And I thought, you know what?
That's really right.
I know that that's really right.
And I didn't want to give anybody the wrong impression about that.
And I had to bring you on just like you were saying, I think, so that you can tell people exactly how they can quit the military, because as you might imagine, there are quite a few people, not just veterans, but active duty military people who listen to this show on a regular basis.
Yes.
Well, let me let me address the sort of ethical condemnation issue first, because it is a very important one.
And we do generally as libertarians or as ethicists look more favorably on soldiers who sort of don't know better and maybe are naive.
We think of them as being gullible and being lied to and sucked into it.
But you could just as well say the same about cops.
And I think what's more important to parse out is the intent.
There are people who join either the police force or the military because they just want to bleach off the system.
You know, they just want to have a good job and they, you know, they think it's an honorable thing or they can, you know, lie to themselves enough to go, OK, well, I'm just I'm getting I'm getting good dental coverage out of this deal.
And they don't really care.
And there is a certain certain disgustingness of the moral equivalence of that.
That's almost worse than saying I believe in what we are doing and I am well-intentioned because I was I had no ill will in my heart.
I had some really bad ideas.
I had some some deep seated problems that led me to enlist in the Marine Corps, you know, like full metal jacket.
I wanted to be the first kid on my blog with a confirmed kill.
And I look back and go, man, that that's that that might be sadistic, you know.
And there there are cops who like, you know, one of my favorite comedians, Kyle Kinane, says, you know, well, they were paying five dollars an hour more than the post office and I get to carry a gun.
And he gives you like, I was almost that dude.
You know, I could see myself in that position.
And that's not morally condemnable as the guy, as much as the cop that we libertarians like to focus on, who's the asshole cop who's like, I got beat up as a kid and now I get to wear a badge and hide behind this institution and I get to take out my insecurities on other people.
And that's the bully cop.
And that guy up and down, left and right, forwards and backwards every day of the week.
Absolutely.
But that guy's in the military, too.
There are guys who joined and it's a smaller minority and it's less in your face and it's kind of we're kind of isolated from it.
But in the Marines, you know, there's a small percentage.
There's a handful of guys like that.
And there's a little bit of that in a lot of people.
And I have to admit that that was part of it for me, too, at least in the I'm looking for an excuse to do something brutal, but I'm looking for an excuse to make it righteous, you know, and that's kind of sick, too.
And so to your more important question about getting out at every time, any time, I want to start with plugging a website that I always send people to who are the real experts who about navigating the exact current legal circumstances that you may be facing in the military.
And it's G.I. Rights Hotline dot org, G.I. Rights Hotline dot org.
Everybody, everybody, everybody listening, even if you don't care, you don't have to go read the website.
You should write that down.
I say pull it up on your browser, bookmark it so you don't forget.
I have it in my Google keyboard on my phone.
So when I put in G.I.G.I. Rights Hotline dot org pops up automatically because I text it to so many people messages on Twitter, Instagram.
Hey, I need help getting out of the military.
I need help dealing with this legal challenge in the military.
I want to get out as a conscientious objector.
I disobeyed this illegal order, this thing that I thought was wrong.
And now I'm in trouble with my command.
You need someone to talk to to navigate the exact legal circumstances.
That's it right there.
G.I. Rights Hotline dot org, G.I. Rights Hotline dot org.
But I do want to acknowledge the objection to my point.
And I think it's really important what you would use it as even more important that you don't we don't want to give people the wrong idea that, oh, well, you're in the military, tough, but, you know, you got to keep following orders and murder babies if that's what they're telling you to do.
No, you don't.
Absolutely not.
And so as someone who who can say, please learn from my mistakes, learn from my experience, learn from what I figured out.
You know, I tortured people and I did it.
I was on a civil affairs team.
I went to Iraq.
I volunteered as a reservist to go on active duty and specifically go to Fallujah with a civil affairs team to be on the front lines and to do something righteous that I thought was rebuilding the country.
And I was definitely disillusioned of that during my deployment there.
You tortured people.
How broadly are you defining that term when you say that?
Well, I'm being pretty inclusive.
And but what I did was you're saying you helped besiege Fallujah or you actually brutalized a prisoner.
Both.
So first, in the bigger sense, I was the party to the war crime.
That was the post-invasion occupation of Iraq.
Specifically, I was part of the siege of Fallujah.
My six man civil affairs team was attached to, I think it was Mike Company 2-1.
And they were responsible for the siege in the first battle of Fallujah in April 2004, after the four Blackwater guys got strung up and burned on the bridge, the northern bridge over the Euphrates.
We were there.
I ran a checkpoint during the siege of Fallujah when we had the city cordoned off and surrounded.
And then specifically myself, I was ordered filling in for the grunts to guard detainees who were just trying to escape the city while it was being shelled.
And they had their hands zip tied behind them and hoods over their sandbags over their heads.
And they were sat cross-legged on a cement floor.
Now, if you do that to someone for a few minutes, you can say, OK, well, that's just sort of, you know, handling detainees.
When you're forced to sit in that position and not allowed to go to the bathroom for an extended period of time, that's torture.
Yeah.
And so I wasn't told, hey, you're going to be in a detainee handling role and you're going to do you're going to do enhanced interrogation and here's training.
It was just like, well, this is what we do.
This is how we handle detainees.
Civil affairs guy, you're filling in for the grunts now because they're doing guard these detainees for a shift.
You know, and I use my Arabic to taunt them and keep them in that position, they were not allowed to sleep, to nod off, they had to sit upright, you know, or or they would be physically abused.
So I wasn't doing Abu Ghraib level shit.
And for me, I mean, I kind of have the excuse that it wasn't thoughtful.
It was sort of in the moment.
Oh, yeah.
Go guard these detainees.
OK, I can guard detainees.
OK, here's your instructions for guarding detainees.
Wait a second.
But I can't even say that I thought really to resist, I can I can make that excuse for myself, you know, and say that, you know, well, it wasn't torture because of this or that, but no, it was across that line.
Absolutely.
And I want to take responsibility for that.
And I wish I had.
And I even could have done it in a way that.
Kept me from directly disobeying orders, I could have been like, hey, isn't this inappropriate based on what we've been told about the Geneva conventions and even just verbally resisted, but it didn't even occur to me.
So absolutely, I was I was culpable and a willing participant in a war crime and in having a direct hand in torture myself.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, it sure does.
And, you know, besides your personal experience there, which I don't mean to interrupt, you can go on and say whatever you want to, but I think it's important the way that you include just holding people, not even necessarily in a stress position, but just hell, just sitting down in handcuffs all day long, unable to move and then all day and all night and then what all day again, this kind of thing out in the hot sun that, hey, at some point early on in that process, that does count as torture.
Man, you try just sitting cross-legged on a hard floor and not getting up.
I mean, your legs are going to go numb in like five, 10 minutes.
These guys had been there for at least hours.
This was at night.
It was in the guard shack next to the northern bridge by the Fallujah General Hospital, which is on the peninsula of the Euphrates on the west side of Fallujah.
And they had been there long enough that they were already, you know, covered in their own or at least, you know, they'd gone to the bathroom on themselves.
Yeah.
I'll tell you what.
I mean, I interviewed a guy, I interviewed a guy who was a military policeman who almost arrested H.R. McMaster for exactly this going on at his base at Tal Afar under his authority back then.
And they just swept that right under the rug.
But this was the exact kind of thing, leaving these guys out there in the hot sun for so long and covered, as you say, in their own mess and the rest of this.
And then, as you say, you know, brutalized, too, which means, you know, at least kicked or whatever if they start slouching.
Right.
Yeah.
And in my case, I wasn't I mean, again, trying to make excuses for myself, right, or contextualize for moral, you know, absolution.
I didn't physically brutalize him.
I just sort of poked at him with my rifle, you know, was all that was needed, you know, because they knew guys before had done worse.
Well, look, I mean, that's a rack war, too, in a very small microcosm.
But you could just, you know, add water.
And it's the same thing writ large, too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I want to acknowledge the why it seems easier that as a cop, you can sort of quit at any time.
But there are also contracts.
There are restrictions.
There are other things.
Whereas in the military, when you find yourself in combat, if you are in combat and you and you have that moment of waking up, yes, it is harder.
But when you're stateside at any time, any time you can say, I want to be a conscientious objector, I'm not going to deploy.
And you will not deploy.
Is that what you did?
No, I wish I wish I could have.
I did not.
I didn't really wake up until I got out.
And and I, I mean, I have some token of sort of active military resistance, I can claim.
But it was like when I was in the inactive reserve, they came after me for, quote, protesting in uniform for the street theater action in 2007 with Iraq Veterans Against the War.
And the Marine Corps came after me trying to strip me of my benefits and downgrade my discharge for, quote, protesting in uniform.
And we we kind of wrestled that to a tie.
It's a long, dumb story.
But that's how I first became a significant public figure as an antiwar activist.
Yeah.
Hey, I'll check out my new book.
Enough already.
Time to end the war on terrorism at enough already book dot net.
Early reviews are that people either think it's hilarious or they get so angry that they put it down.
But it's the Iranian revolution, the 80s Afghan war, the Iran Iraq war, Iraq War one, Iraq War one and a half, and then Afghanistan, Iraq War two, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq War three, Yemen and all the special operations wars throughout Africa in the aftermath of the war in Libya.
It's all there for you.
Might change a friend's mind.
Enough already.
Time to end the war on terrorism at enough already book dot net.
Hey, guys, Scott Horton here for expand designs dot com.
Harley Abbott and his crew do an outstanding job designing, building and maintaining my sites, and they'll do great work for you.
You need a new website.
Go to expand designs dot com slash Scott.
And say 500 bucks.
Hey, guys, check out listen and think audio books.
They're listen and think dot com.
And of course, on audible dot com.
And they feature my book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, as well as brand new out inside Syria by our friend Reese Ehrlich and a lot of other great books, mostly by libertarians there.
Reese might be one exception, but essentially they're all libertarian audio books.
And here's how you can get a lifetime subscription to listen and think audio books.
Just donate one hundred dollars to the Scott Horton show at Scott Horton dot org slash donate.
All right.
And so tell me more about what you know about actual conscientious objectors who've gotten out and how difficult it's been for them or what other advice that you can give to people in the military who might be looking for a way out of there?
Yeah.
So the process varies a little bit from time to time and branch to branch and individual to individual, unit to unit situation, a situation.
But this is where, again, G.I. Wright's hotline dot org is an incredible resource that will walk you through exactly what you need to do for your circumstance.
And they aren't designed.
I mean, the military is not set up to make this easy, obviously.
Well, give us some examples.
What what might that look like having to go through the which is filling out a form and then waiting two weeks and filling out another form or what are we talking about?
Kind of.
Yes.
And they are going to bully you and your officers might ridicule you and they might try to, you know, some verbal bullying and they might put you on shit duty while you're waiting for the process to go through.
But I would say the first thing to do is call G.I. Wright's hotline dot org.
Go to the website.
There's there's an 800 number you can call and actually talk to someone and they will explain your situation and they will tell you how to initiate the process.
And it might be a form that you give to your CEO or your your unit clerk.
And that initiates the process into a series of interviews and forms you have to fill out.
And you're going to have to talk to the chaplain and make a statement that your beliefs are true and deep held and not fleeting sincerity.
It's like a statement of sincerity.
And so I don't I don't pretend it's not my job.
It's not my mission to keep up on those legal details and walk dudes through this.
A lot of guys ask me for recommendation letters that go into their conscientious objector package that will say, you know, Adam, I believe in Adam's perspective.
And Adam will testify that his perspective means this.
And so I've submitted that about a dozen times, but it's not even necessary.
Some guys just like on, ha ha.
I got my CEO status with a Kokesh letter on file.
You know, that's that's a cool thing for them.
That's it might help.
It might not.
In some cases, it's definitely not necessary.
But it's one of those things that bolsters the the case of sincerity.
But you have to be ready, one, for them to draw out this process that they might make it take months.
They might make it take.
I've heard of some take a year.
But you won't deploy.
You won't go to combat.
You won't you won't go on any kind of combat mission once you've initiated the process.
And I've never heard of anyone who's persisted through it be denied.
So they they will slow it down and you will keep getting paid and you will keep getting housed as a member of the military until they discharge you.
They can give you shit duty.
They can give you shit hours, whatever it is.
They they can't take away those basic rights and privileges.
I'll say rights.
You don't have any rights when you're in the military, you know.
But if you tell them, hey, guys, I don't want to play anymore.
I'm not I'm not going to do this.
I I object morally to being a part of this institution.
I want out.
You can do it.
Because at some point, they don't want your ass after that anyway, right?
Yep, exactly.
Which is fine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, well, that's good.
And listen, you know, there's been a lot of guys who've done it.
And, you know, fortunately, fewer and fewer GIs are seeing combat these days.
There's still special operations forces, you know, all over Africa and whatever.
But we don't have these large scale.
And hey, there's still 6000 guys in Iraq, you know, and a few thousand in Syria and whatever.
But nothing like what we had at that time, at least to help evacuate the embassy.
So that headline today.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
There that's people are saying, oh, no, they're reescalating the war.
I said, yeah, no, that's for the fall of Saigon.
That's all.
Hopefully.
Yeah.
I mean, and it sucks because there's a lot of Afghans and a lot of Americans and a lot of other people been through hell over there for what amounts to no reason at all after all this time.
And the title of your book, Fool's Aaron, speaks so well directly to that.
But if you don't mind, while I'm here, I want to plug a couple of things.
Yeah.
First, I got a new nonprofit called Homefront Battle Buddies.
We have a great website called Homefront Battle Buddies dot com.
And our mission statement is to create a community of veterans through online organizing and in-person retreats to facilitate veterans helping each other pursue alternative therapies and transition to civilian life.
So we get to be a federal nonprofit while doing just facilitating with our funding officially.
But what are we facilitating?
Hey, that's getting vets stoned in the woods, experimenting with mushrooms and MDMA in a serious and safe therapeutic setting where there's a brotherhood of veterans able to get that therapy that is being denied from us.
And eventually we want to be the tip of the spear in ending what's left of the drug war as well and say, look, you want to tell us that we fought for our freedom?
We fought for your freedom.
Well, why not respect ours for a minute when we want to medicate how we see fit?
Really, you're going to lock me up because I'm doing psilocybin with other veterans and I'm not hurting anybody.
Good luck getting away with that and getting reelected.
You know, we're going to we're going to play that card.
And to some degree, either with this organization or with this organization being a facilitator, we're going to we're going to push this.
And what I want to do with this organization is build it over the next few years so that we can make these services available in 10 regional camps with four campsites, each capable of running simultaneous retreats all over the country so that every veteran in America who wants this experience can get it.
And.
I say over 20 years, because I think we can do it, we can we can really meet the complete objective of this tactic, this set of tactics, rather, and make sure that our generation of veterans is empowered so that we can as activists and as participants in politics and in our communities and in the economy and as entrepreneurs and in the world at large, make sure that the world learns the lessons of our experience so that we can be the last generation of combat veterans the world ever knows.
So, Scott, any any questions or suggestions or thoughts on that?
Before my last thing, the website Homefront Battle Buddies dot com.
No, I just want to thank you, man.
I think you make a great role model.
I sure hope you do.
I know you have in the past.
And I hope that that this interview helps get through to a few people.
I have had people, you know, I've done a lot of traveling just in the last few months here.
And I've had, you know, at least a solid handful of different people tell me they were going to join the military, but they didn't because of this show.
And then, of course, plenty of people who told me that they quit the military because of this show, too.
But I really like the ones where, man, I was about to join.
And then I listened to this and I was like, no, man, I can't be part of this shit.
So it matters.
And look, I've always thought.
And you can tell the show is not geared toward people in Washington, D.C., the show is geared toward regular people, and I never thought I could really change the way things are, but I know for a fact from the very beginning of doing radio that I can get through to individual people in a way that matters to them.
And that'll be good enough for me.
And so those kind of examples are my favorite of those, though, you know.
Well, the last thing I want to plug is this show as someone who does independent media on my own and you can find me whatever our website's under construction, Adam versus the man dot com.
I know that what Scott does takes a lot of commitment.
And like you said before, he's got how many episodes under your belt of five thousand five hundred and sixty something now, six, 70, maybe.
I'm not even on episode three or 700 yet of Adam versus the man.
And I look at that number and it's just like daunting and saying, I mean, your commitment is unquestionable.
And I hope that you and your audience are able to make the the base expand with this show because it can be extremely powerful and it can be extremely effective.
And I want everybody listening to realize that this technology, this ability to broadcast and communicate and have these conversations is great with Scott hosting the show.
But it means nothing without a deliberately conscientiously engaged audience who aren't just conscientious of consumers of information, but help make the marketplace of ideas better for everybody.
So humanity can realize the benefits of these ideas that we know are so fundamentally important to human progress.
So share this episode.
If you didn't like me, share one of his other episodes.
Do what he does, whatever you can to support this show.
And if it's not this show, find something that is because advancing humanity through more enlightened conversations like this is absolutely critical.
And people like Scott deserve your support.
He has proven himself to be principled, committed and to have the endurance so that, you know, when you support his show and you're investing in him, that investment is not going to be wasted on somebody who's fly by night or just somebody who's here because they want to get famous.
Scott is here for the right reasons.
And his voice deserves your support.
Ah, that's really nice as hell.
Love you.
All right.
So G.I. Writes Hotline dot org.
And how do people find you and your great show, Adam?
G.I. Writes Hotline dot org.
G.I. Writes Hotline dot org.
G.I. Writes Hotline dot org.
First and foremost, pull it up, bookmark it, save it on your phone somewhere.
Be ready to give that to everybody who's thinking about getting out of the military.
You can find me at Anna versus the man, Doc.
And if you want to get involved with our nonprofit, I'm from Battle Bodies and Battle Bodies dot com.
All right.
Well, your Internet broke up right when you said that.
Adam versus the man dot com and Battle Buddies dot com.
Is that right?
Homefront Battle Buddies dot com.
I'm sorry.
I live in the boonies and I live in a third country.
So, you know, Verizon.
Yeah, no, no, it works fine for 90 percent of the thing or more.
So it's great.
All right.
Well, thank you again, Adam.
Great to talk to you, buddy.
My pleasure.
The Scott Horton Show, antiwar radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com antiwar dot com.
Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
