Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Bruce Fine.
He was Associate Deputy Attorney General and General Counsel of the Federal Communications Commission under Ronald Reagan and counsel to the Joint Congressional Committee on Covert Arms Sales to Iran.
Oh, that sounds like fun.
I don't think I've ever interviewed you about that.
Bruce Fine, welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thank you, Scott.
And so you were on the Cheney cover-up committee there or you were on the good guy side?
No, well, I don't know what they called the cover-up committee.
It was a very complicated kind of case, especially because there was a companion criminal investigation run by Lawrence Walsh.
So there are good points and bad points on both sides.
But I will say this, Scott.
In defense of President Reagan, he waived executive privilege, state secrets for everybody.
So we heard first-hand accounts of National Security Council meetings from George Shultz, from the National Security Advisor, from Poindexter, from everybody.
There was no attempt to invoke any secrecy whatsoever, which I give great credit to President Reagan for doing that.
He could have tied the whole thing up in fits, going to court and forcing subpoenas and whatever.
It was a total open investigation on that score.
Yeah.
All right.
Fair enough for that.
And that is kind of our subject today, too, is the powers of the presidency here, broadly considered.
Trump wields signing statements, carves up defense bill.
That's a good way to put it.
Fifty signing statements on the National Defense Authorization Act?
Yes.
The signing statement that he issued, in acronymic terms, they called the NDA, National Defense Authorization Act, for 2019.
It has literally hundreds of pages.
And his signing statement said there are about 50 provisions that he simply would ignore, that they encroached on his authority as Commander-in-Chief, the sole organ of the United States as a foreign policy.
Clearly not an accurate description of constitutional allocation of powers.
But I want to underscore this is hardly the first time a president has done that.
It probably reached its high-water mark under President George W. Bush.
Charlie Savage of the New York Times wrote a very extensive book on signing statements.
It probably reached 1,000.
We don't have that number by 18 months.
I'm sorry, I lost you there for a second.
You said you don't have that number by what?
No, I'm just saying that George W. Bush had issued approximately 1,000 signing statements.
Mr. Trump has not reached that threshold.
But Mr. Bush served two terms, and we're only 18 months into the presidency of Mr. Trump.
Sure.
Well, and now you talk about the most important one of these, or at least the one we noticed at AntiWar.com here was about Yemen, where surprisingly a resolution about Yemen made it through conference committee and was part of this NDAA, and he just said in his signing statement he's going to ignore it.
Can you tell us more about that?
Yes.
The provision, that issue, stated that the president would need to cease the assistance, the military assistance we are providing, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates coalition in fighting what are the so-called Houthi faction in Yemen.
Unless the Secretary of State could certify that the coalition, the Saudis and the Emiratis are not violating international law, committing war crimes by bombing civilian targets, including recently a bus where 40-some children aged 6 to 11 were all slaughtered.
It's notorious over these last several years that both the Saudis and Emiratis are implicated in bombing hospitals and schools, civilians.
There are currently millions of civilians who are threatened with starvation because the Saudis will not permit humanitarian aid to move unobstructed through important ports.
And the gist of the provision was unless we can certify that we ourselves are not supporting war crimes by our so-called allies through refueling operations and intelligence targeting, we have to leave and desist from our support for the Saudi coalition.
We can still use military force and self-defense if we actually are attacked, but with regard to remaining involved with this rather diabolical coalition, it would be off the radar screen.
Now, the provision, however, still said that notwithstanding the prohibition, if the Secretary of State would certify that continuing to support the Saudi Arabians and Emirates was vital and indispensable to national security, then he could waive the prohibition upon military assistance and have it continue.
So it wasn't as strict as it might have been.
Now, to show you how I think unknowing the administration is about the wrongdoing, we have the Department of Defense repeatedly saying, Scott, that they have no idea.
They are clueless about where these planes are going after they refuel them.
This is our Defense Department with the National Security.
So I wrote and said, well, how about reading a copy of the New York Times if you want to get clued in?
It's not a mystery to anybody else.
Only our Defense Department says, well, we really don't know what they're doing with our weapons and bombs and targeting information.
Of course they know, and that's exactly why they're saying they don't know, because they understand all of the criminality that's going on right under their face.
Now, why are they doing this?
What's in it for the United States?
Well, the real enemy here is not the Houthis.
The United States feels that Iran, as she is, they are supporting the Houthis.
And so this is, hey, anything that Iran supports we have to oppose, because Iran is the bugbear not only of the United States but Israel.
And therefore, their really ulterior motives are supporting the Saudi Arabians and Emiratis.
It's to send a message to Iran, hey, don't try to extend your particular zone of influence, if you will, even though the United States claims a right to have its zone of influence in every nook and cranny of the entire planet.
Yeah, well, that's surely true.
And, you know, I actually read that – a couple of side points here before we get back to the science statement.
I actually read that Elizabeth Warren had – I don't know if it was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs or one of these – testified that along these lines, what you're saying that, you know, geez, we don't know what they're doing with these planes and bombs once we refuel them and they go off.
And that then Iona Craig had written this piece for The Intercept, which I interviewed her about, where she had a document where it was an American write-up of a Saudi attack that had almost killed this entire family, had missed them barely.
And it proves that, in fact, here you have an American embedded inside the Saudi war room who's, you know, whatever rank, reporting to his superior officers.
Here's exactly what happened with that screw-up today.
And so we know now that he lied to Elizabeth Warren, under oath apparently.
Aren't they all under oath when they're testifying before the Senate?
It varies, Scott.
It's not a uniform practice.
But remember, even if you're not under oath, if you make a material misstatement with the intent to obstruct an investigation, that's obstruction of justice even if the statement is not under oath.
And if the purpose of the investigation was to identify and expose United States complicity in the operation, I can't think of a statement that's more intended to obstruct that particular investigation than the one you've just described.
Yeah.
Well, I guess we'll see if – and that counts legally too for a senator's question just as well as a criminal investigation, you're saying?
That's right.
Even if it's not a criminal investigation, just a hearing pursuing a legislative objective, the criminal attachment would apply.
Yeah.
Well, not that there will be accountability there on that particular lie necessarily, but maybe there will be some backlash by the senators on that.
They keep being deceived.
They complained before that right after they declined to take up the War Powers Act on this, they found out that actually, yeah, there are, I guess, Green Berets or Rangers on the ground there taking on AQAP targets supposedly when they had not been told that – or no, oh, I'm sorry.
That was a separate story.
That there were special operations forces on the ground in Saudi helping fight on the northern side of the Yemen border there.
And that was the brand-new thing that came out right after they had been lied to and then declined to invoke the War Powers Act based on that lie.
Yes, and to show you how bad it is, unfortunately this is not just a Trump phenomenon.
You remember – I'm sure you do – the infamous testimony of James Clapper when there were oversight hearings, the intelligence community, by Senator Ron Wyden.
I think this was March 2016, and he said in response to a simple question, are you collecting data on millions of Americans?
Senator Clapper said, no.
He's collecting data on hundreds of millions of Americans, a clear and flagrant lie.
Not only did he never apologize for the lie, Mr. Obama, the president, appointed him to investigate needed reforms in the intelligence community.
So we have a history over many years now of knowing and purposeful lies to Congress.
The kind of lies that ultimately, when you and I were younger, led to Richard Helms pleading no contender to lying about the CIA involvement in the overthrow of Salvador Allende and influencing elections in Chile.
But that was in 1972-73.
Now Congress does nothing.
They permit their prerogatives be flouted with impunity and simply stand back.
And that's why they've turned into a literal inkblot.
They make noise and they scream and yell, but when it comes to actually asserting themselves, no.
Impeachment, no.
Use the appropriations power to cut off funds, no.
They simply back away.
They've become an ornamental institution, bowing and adorning an empire-like presidency.
Speaking of which, when we read all about – and the AP has done some great work on this – these stories about the United Arab Emirates forces on the ground torturing people, sexual torture, as they put it euphemistically, and then also including roasting people on a spit like the Ewoks.
Only much worse.
So my question for you is, isn't that illegal then?
Isn't there already a rule passed by the Congress that says you cannot take the side of foreign torturers on the battlefield or some kind of thing?
Well, there's something that's similar to that, Scott.
It's called the Leahy Amendment, and the Leahy Amendment says that we can't provide any kind of military assistance or training to any units who are involved in gross violations of human rights.
And what you've described certainly would seem to be a gross violation of human rights.
So the issue is – but the Leahy language is drafted in a way that it doesn't apply government-wide.
It means that we can't provide assistance to the unit or the portion of the armed forces of a foreign country that are implicated in these kinds of crimes.
So now I would – I think, like you probably, I would have the prohibition broader than the Leahy Amendment.
If you have a unit involved and you do nothing to sanction them, the whole government then becomes subject to the prohibition.
But the language isn't that broad as of yet.
But that's the question that would be – that's raised by your noting here what the Emiratis are doing.
Are we providing any kind of this refueling, targeting assistance, other assistance, training to any of these units that have committed these grisly crimes you've just described?
Yeah.
I remember in 1999, Bill Clinton started bombing Serbia to force them to let Kosovo go basically.
And it was supposed to take the weekend.
It was supposed to be over and done.
And then it didn't.
It dragged on for, what, six or nine weeks or some kind of thing.
And it was a horrible thing.
And a lot of civilians were killed.
And the KLA were a bunch of bad guys themselves.
And it was a hell of a thing.
But this is just like that, only now it's three and a half years.
Operation Decisive Storm.
And the Saudis in the air and the UAE on the ground, they're no closer to sacking the capital city and driving the Houthis out of power there and reinstalling Hadi on the throne.
And everybody knows it.
You mentioned, hey, just read it in The New York Times.
Just read it in The New York Times.
No one's even pretending that Hadi is ever going to be the president of Yemen again.
And so – but this just goes on.
It does because it's really not – it's not about Yemen.
It's about Iran and how we're just trying to contain Iran.
All it is ultimately is not only about Iran.
It's about Israel, too, because Israel wants to hold Iran in check as well.
And they think that they want to jump aboard and even have some kind of vote of endeavor with their chief enemy, Saudi Arabia, because now Iran, with the nuclear issue, is more important.
It used to be Iraq was the biggest enemy.
At one time it was Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabia protested the movement of our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
And so you have all these very nefarious, ulterior, subterranean motives at work here.
So you try to use logic, and it doesn't get you anywhere.
But that's what happens when you move to an empire, Scott.
We no longer have any sense of reason or purpose behind the projection of military force.
It's just we do it like strutting around on a field to just show people that you don't mess with us because we're tough.
We are at that level of adolescence in our foreign policy now.
Well, it just shows you we're tough.
Remember months ago the mother of all bombs dropped in Afghanistan.
We're going to show how tough we were.
OK, it was the mother of all bombs.
Did it have any influence?
Zero.
But why did we do it?
Everybody knew it would have nothing.
Just to show, hey, we're the tough guy.
We can be like Joe Dempsey in the boxing ring and smash somebody in the face.
And that gives us an adolescent thrill that we're number one.
Yeah.
Well, in fact, in that case it was counterproductive.
And the so-called Islamic State group there in Nangarhar province said, see how important we are, that they used their biggest bomb on us?
And that really helped to boost them, at least according to some local reports.
And then here's the thing, too, is, as I really should mention, I think, that I just read this piece on the Carnegie Endowment website from a few months ago.
Or actually, no, it was, I guess, from the beginning of 2017, debunking the whole mythology of Iran's support for the Houthis.
There's another great article by Joost Hilterman at foreignpolicy.com called The Houthis Are Not Hezbollah.
And, of course, the great Gareth Porter has debunked the stories about these armed shipments.
In fact, one of them was the Yemeni shipping guns to Somalia.
Because even in the midst of the war, they're so lousy with weapons, they're exporting them still.
And they pretended that, no, this is Iran shipping weapons.
We're supposed to believe Iran is shipping the missiles.
When the whole place is under an American blockade, they are not shipping the missiles.
What a lie.
How could they possibly be?
And so that's the whole thing.
You talk about it's all about Iran.
And you're right, that that's the consensus.
But it's all a lie, just like always with these people.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you're absolutely right.
This is the equivalent of the WMD in Iraq under Saddam.
Okay, yeah, Iran is providing these missiles.
We've been able to identify.
They couldn't have shot them unless Iran provided X, Y, Z.
We're the ones who provide weapons all throughout the world and end up in every virtual battle that you can find.
You probably trace it back in some way or another to the United States.
We sell more weapons, and they all get plundered and sold by our so-called allies because they want money.
And they're totally disloyal to the regime that's corrupt as can be.
And we keep playing the fool and keep giving them the weapons and hoping we can prop up something that is destined to collapse.
For the same reason why you described the Hadi regime is never going to return to any kind of power or control in Yemen.
Now, the other thing that I think, Scott, that we should focus on at least for a while is the fact that when the United States gives systematic military support to a country that's obligerant, involved in a war, we become a co-belligerent.
And under the Constitution, we can't become a co-belligerent unless Congress has explicitly authorized, declared our co-belligerency.
Because when you are a co-belligerent, you're open to attack by the enemy just as you're a belligerent.
That means you can be shot at and your people can be killed without violating the laws against murder because you're at war.
And yet with regard to our assistance, we're head deep into the war with the Saudis and the Emiratis, Congress has never declared war on the Houthis or on Iran for that matter.
So we have this situation where we have another unconstitutional war going on, just like the one in Syria and the ones that we've had all over.
We now have about nine of them.
And Congress just shrugs its shoulders, does nothing.
The Scott Horton Show is brought to you by books.
Particularly, Kesslin Runs, a new dystopian novel about the very near future by the great Charles Featherstone.
Kesslin Runs.
Also, No Dev, No Ops, No IT by Hussein Badakchani and The War State by Mike Swanson about the rise of the military-industrial complex in America after World War II.
He also gives great investment advice at wallstreetwindow.com.
And when you follow his advice, you'll want to get some precious metals, gold and silver and etc. from Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc.
That's at rrbi.co, rrbi.co.
Also, check out ZenCash at zencash.com or zensystem.io.
It's a great digital currency, but it's also a messaging app and a document transfer app and all kinds of great stuff too.
Learn all about it at zencash.com.
And then there's Tom Wood's Liberty Classroom.
If you sign up from the link on my page at scotthorton.org, I'll get a little bit of a kickback there.
And check this out, speaking of scotthorton.org, if you'd like expanddesigns.com to build you a new 2018 model website, go to expanddesigns.com slash scott and you'll save 500 bucks.
Also, don't forget thebumpersticker.com.
Stickers for your band or your business at very reasonable prices.
High quality stuff there.
It used to be my company back when.
Thebumpersticker.com.
All right.
And then, so now at the top of this empire is the emperor, Donald Trump.
And back to that signing statement on this issue, you described there what the resolution tried to say.
And so then what did his signing statement say?
Well, the signing statement was drafted in kind of an opaque way.
It made reference to this particular provision.
And it said in substance, you know, I will treat this as advisory because this is an encroachment on my powers as commander in chief and as the foreign policy organ of the United States.
It didn't really amplify anything further than that.
And those assertions are utterly preposterous.
The commander in chief power is not a power to go to war.
Alexander Hamilton explained that very explicitly in Federalist 69.
And no, the president is not the sole organ of the United States in foreign policy.
I mean just think off the top of our head, Scott, how many provisions in foreign policy we know Congress enacted?
Jackson-Vanik Amendment, the Taiwan Relations Act, the Sanctions Against Russia, the Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.
Congress gets involved in foreign relations all the time.
You had members of Congress who were sitting with the delegation that negotiated the United Nations Treaty.
They were there in negotiating treaties with Spain after the Spanish-American War.
So the idea that the president is the sole organ of foreign policy is counterfactual and certainly counter-constitutional.
But that's all he said.
It was a conclusory statement.
It wasn't well-reasoned.
And again, Congress just sits and does nothing.
As I said in my article, Congress ought to go to court because they're too cowardly to just cut off the funds for implementing a statute where there's a signing statement appended and sue through committees to have the court.
These are valid provisions.
Once a president signs a bill, all the provisions become valid.
I mean this idea that you can sign a bill and not at all come valid, just think even in a metaphysical sense how absurd that is, Scott.
How can he pick and choose once he puts his name on the bill which ones get electrified and which ones go into a burial ground?
Take this situation, Scott.
Suppose what the president did if he didn't like the NDA and he didn't want to have Congress override it like Congress overrode Nixon's veto of the War Powers Resolution.
He just issues a signing statement.
He doesn't veto it.
He says, I'm treating the entire bill as advisory because I think it encroaches on my powers.
He doesn't do anything more.
He doesn't return it to Congress.
There's no veto vote.
I mean he's basically nullified the legislative power.
Right.
Well, and so you cite in the article how Richard Nixon didn't dare when it came to this kind of thing.
He didn't think to even try it.
Yeah, that's right.
And he went and he did comply with the congressional cutoff and the limitations on his authority.
It came largely in his ability to conduct war in Indochina.
And that just shows how far we've come.
I mean remember Arthur Schlesinger, the scholar up at Harvard, he's the one who coined the imperial presidency under Nixon.
I mean where are we now?
I mean Nixon compared to today, I mean he's kind of a princeling compared to the emperor.
His powers are nothing compared to what presidents claim today with impunity.
And Nixon largely got impeached and removed for hours from office for these kind of claims and exercises.
And now all we do is see kowtowing from Congress and the American people are complacent.
It's truly stunning.
We have turned into a culture that rewards and pays tribute to empire, not Republican government and rule of law.
And now it was really George W. Bush that broke the ice on all of this, set all the precedents for these kind of things.
Well, he took them to a new level is what I can say.
They had already been set in train earlier by Clinton.
Remember with regard to President Clinton, he asked Congress for a declaration of war against Bosnia.
Congress, the House, voted it down.
Then he said, okay, I'll just go to war and won't call it war.
And one I know, a friend of mine, Thomas Campbell, you may have had him on your show.
He was a Republican from California representative.
He went and sued Clinton.
And the court says political question, they wouldn't decide the case.
So it's just – I would say, Scott, it's been incremental.
Certainly it accelerated after 9-11 with Bush, but it was already – that trajectory was already in train for at least 10 years before that time.
And it keeps getting worse under every presidency, whether it's a Republican or Democrat.
It doesn't – it only goes in one direction, more and more power.
The only question is do you grab power at Allegro or at Adagio pace if we're using musical metaphors here.
But the direction is only one way.
Well, and then, like you said, the courts always just say, well, this is a political question.
You guys have to work this out.
They'll refuse to rule, right?
That is correct.
The court has never, ever in its history ever ruled on the constitutionality of a war.
They evaded it all throughout Vietnam.
They kind of hinted that the Korean War was unconstitutional but really didn't take that issue on.
And certainly with regard to all the wars since 9-11, no way have they ever even approached deciding that question.
Well, I mean like you were saying earlier about the signing statements here that they should take this to court.
Is that a different category somehow that they wouldn't just invoke the political question doctrine?
Well, I think it is because here what I envision, Scott, is not having the court shut down the war but just declare what the law is and then say now it's up to Congress to decide to enforce it.
Then you get out of the argument that, oh, it's just political.
It really is invalid.
It's an encroachment on my powers.
Once you have the court, which commands far more respect than Congress by the American people, say no, the law means X, and the president is supposed to obey it.
But it doesn't do anything more than declare the law.
At that point, I think a court is more likely to do that than issue an injunction and say the president has to start removing troops from XYZ country.
And the court is not going to do that.
But they could just declare this is what the law is and then hand it back to Congress and say now you decide what the consequences are for the president violating a law as a judicial officer declared it, not as a law as a partisan Congress declared it.
Well, and then they would be saying what the law is based on just Supreme Court precedent against the line-item veto and that kind of thing?
That is correct.
Yes, absolutely.
You're absolutely correct on that score.
And I say the one – and the fact is that these are not novel efforts of Congress to control the executive and war powers.
I pointed out in my article and you've addressed here that it happened repeatedly all throughout Vietnam.
And the court didn't invalidate any of those saying, oh, you're encroaching on the president's power to fight war.
And even if we go back to the Korean War, the court upheld the inability of the president to see steel mills in the name of fighting North Korean and the Chinese in the Korean War.
And Congress hadn't authorized you to do that.
So the precedents are there, but the culture changes and it's not so crystal clear.
Like the president has to be 35 years old in order to be qualified to occupy the White House.
If the culture sufficiently corrupts the thinking, the culture will prevail over the law.
And we saw that in a different area, Scott, for 100 years during Jim Crow.
Even though the Civil War amendments were quite clear, you're not supposed to be subjugating blacks, lynching them, denying them through terror the right to vote.
We had a culture that was racist, white supremacist, the America dilemma, as Gunnar Myrdal said.
And so the law went along with the racism in the culture.
And I'm just worried that the same way that we have an empire culture these days, that the courts will go along with it rather than fight it.
But we still have a chance, and we've got to try even if the prospects aren't certain.
Well, it kind of seems like in a way – do you ever see the South Park episode where they went back in time and they showed how the only reason that they had the First Amendment of free speech was so that they could wage war all the time?
And yet some of the people could complain about it.
And so that would just kind of provide cover for the whole thing.
It sort of seems like the same thing with the division of power on war between the Congress and the president, that sort of neither of them are responsible instead of both of them being jealous of their power and fighting the other over who's allowed to do what.
Instead, the Congress is happy to give the responsibility to the president, and the president is happy to just invoke the responsibility given and then let the CIA and the Pentagon take it from there.
Well, and what you say is very true, Scott, but I think it's even more troublesome than that because I think it's not only the officials.
The American people and the culture, they just don't care.
As long as there's not a bomb hit in their house, who cares?
Bombs get involved in slaughtering other people.
And we are a culture that celebrates unthinkingly a military force just for the sake of being number one.
I attended the All-Star Game at the Washington Nationals Park, and for 45 minutes before the opening pitch, it wasn't bringing out Sandy Koufax or Willie Mays.
It was nothing but a celebration of the military.
Jets flying over and on the big screen there showing our warriors fighting and killing people and then bringing out people that won Medal of Honors for years ago and everybody standing up and clapping even at the seventh inning stretch.
We had a military celebration of God bless America.
I mean, and look at who all our heroes are.
All our heroes are the military people.
They're involved in all of the special treatment they receive in airplanes, and I'm not trying at all to deny the courage and the bravery of their people.
But you've got to ask, hey, but the leaders are sending them, and they're acquiescing in these crazy wars, and we don't even know why we're fighting them.
I mean, year after year after year.
You remember the infamous statement of Richard Clark – not Richard Clark, of Mr. Holbrook, Richard Holbrook.
When he was the – he was called the special envoy on Afghanistan and Pakistan, he was asked, why are we here?
What's the definition of victory?
And he couldn't answer, so he said, well, it's like obscenity.
We'll know it when we see it.
Can you imagine, Scott, sending men and women their courage and sacrifice and die in an enterprise where victory is we'll know it when I see it?
I mean, that's an obscenity.
But our whole culture is saturated with these military emblems, military celebration and ornamentation.
You can even go in to the actual buildings, the office buildings of the House and Senate, and you know who has offices there?
Navy, Army, Air Force, Marines.
They have offices right in the congressional office buildings.
Now, can you imagine Congress having an office in the Pentagon?
No way.
But that just exemplifies how much our military has saturated in to our political culture.
And unless we get away from that, these things are going to continue forever.
Because until the American people tell Congress you're going to kick you out of office if you don't regain control over the war power, it's not going to happen.
Congress is delighted to hand the ball off to the president, so if it goes south, they just say, oh, the president's war, not mine.
Right.
All right, you guys, here's how to support this show.
First of all, subscribe to the RSS feeds, iTunes, Stitcher and all of that.
All the feeds are available at ScottHorton.org and also at LibertarianInstitute.org.
You can also follow me on YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show and sign up for Patreon.
If you do, anybody who signs up for a dollar per interview gets two free books from Listen and Think Audio.
And also, you'll get keys to the new Reddit page, reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
And then if you go to ScottHorton.org slash donate, 20 bucks will get you the audiobook of Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
50 bucks will get you a signed copy of the paperback there.
And a $100 donation will get you either a QR code, commodity disc, or a lifetime subscription to Listen and Think Libertarian audiobooks.
That's all at ScottHorton.org slash donate.
And also, anybody donating $5 or more per month there, if you already are or if you sign up now, you'll get keys to that new Reddit group as well.
Already got about 50 people in there and it's turning out pretty good.
Again, that's reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
If you're already donating or you're a new donor, just email me, Scott, at ScottHorton.org and I'll get you the keys there.
And hey, do me a favor, give me a good review on iTunes or Stitcher or if you liked the book on Amazon.com and the audiobook is also on iTunes and I sure would appreciate that.
And listen, if you want to submit articles to the Libertarian Institute, please do and they don't have to be about foreign policy.
My email address is Scott at ScottHorton.org.
Well, and you know, the people rightly detest all their presidents and congressmen and their presidencies and congresses, but then what does that leave us with?
Trust in the Pentagon and the generals themselves.
That's the only institution left in America that anybody has any faith in.
So, pretty easy to see what our next form of government is going to be.
Like this, only a lot more so.
Yeah, you're exactly right.
It'll be an emperorship in everything but name only.
We'll call it present, but it'll be limitless executive power and I think you're exactly right.
Every day we move closer and closer to that, the signing statements, the secrecy.
Now we've got a space war and everything done unilaterally by the president and virtually no oversight whatsoever.
He basically runs a secret government.
People don't respond to what the congress asked about.
I mean, now it even seeps Scott into the judicial branch where you can read opinions and they're redacted.
The Court of Appeals here for the District of Columbia, they regularly write redacted opinions.
One-eighth of the opinion you can actually read.
This is the Guantanamo Bay detainee cases are characteristic.
I mean, can you imagine going to law school and opening up a book and you see redacted pages?
How can you practice law?
You've got secret provisions in there.
You don't even know what the facts of the case are because they're all redacted.
That's amazing.
Yeah, that is truly amazing.
So all these earmarks, they just push in one direction and it's going to be a time when we will have the equivalent of martial law.
We won't call it martial law.
We'll just say law based upon national security trumping all other interests.
Yeah.
Hey, by the way, as long as I have you here in overtime, can I ask you one more thing here?
Sure.
So I'm interested in your take about Trump and Russia.
And, you know, you have this article, Forget Trump.
The military industrial complex is still running the show with Russia at the American Conservative from last month.
And so I wonder what you think about what he thinks and about his appointment of all these generals to help him run his government.
While at the same time seeming to have somewhat different ideas about what ought to be done with American power while cranking up all the terror wars.
I don't know.
What's your take on all this craziness going on right now?
Well, this is my view, Scott.
One, I don't think Trump has any strategy.
He doesn't have any policy other than he's a narcissist and he does anything that will give him gratification and make him think like he's a tough guy because he's very insecure.
So there isn't any coherence in anything that – if you try to match what he says from what he does, there's just a huge, huge discrepancy.
But I think, Scott, it is a mistake to focus too much on Trump's personality.
The executive branch itself has a personality that's nothing – it's like a pit bull.
It always looks for something to attack because that's what gives it its money, its prestige, leaving footprints in the sands of time.
It's a kinetic branch, a personality.
So even when you have someone like Obama who's not a Napoleonic personality, he still does – he even takes wars beyond what W. Bush did.
And Trump goes even higher even though he says, hey, I want to pull out.
Remember how many times he said, well, let's pull out of Syria?
Well, we should pull out of Iraq.
Hey, it's time to get out of Afghanistan.
He says things, but then he goes and he meets with the military guys.
And what happens?
We end up with more force rather than less because the executive branch personality overcomes the personality of the occupant.
And that is what is so frightening.
And we don't get any pushback at all from Congress.
This is utterly and completely ridiculous.
And that's why in my view, Scott, suppose Hillary Clinton had been elected rather than Trump.
My guess is we'd be in all the same places that we're already in, maybe even more, and confronting China or Russia.
Yeah, and Zawahiri would be the king of Syria.
Yeah, she was even more aggressive than in Syria.
So the problem is institutional problem.
Scott, this fact is perhaps the most remarkable fact in all of U.S. history, although many people would dispute it.
In 228 years, Scott, the Congress of the United States has never once voted to take the United States from a state of peace to a state of war.
In the five wars that it has voted declaration, it has simply acknowledged that we're already put at war because of foreign aggression.
The impressment in World War 18, War of 1812, the shooting of an American soldier in the Mexican-American War, the Havana incident in the USS Maine, Spanish-American War, and the World War I, the sinking of ships that had U.S. Americans on it, and then we had Pearl Harbor.
In every one of those five instances, the Congress says, we are in a state of war because we've been attacked.
But never once has Congress ever passed a declaration that said, we are going from a state of peace to war.
That shows you how prescient James Madison was in saying, listen, if we want to make sure we stay away from being an empire, we fight wars in self-defense.
Millions for defense, not one cent for empire.
We need to entrust the war power to the legislative branch that has no incentive to go to war.
It doesn't get lionized by going to war, and moreover, the legislative branch by nature is a laboratory retriever, not a pit bull.
It talks a lot, but it's the opposite of being kinetic.
It dawdles, which is what you want when it comes to war.
You only want to go to war when it's really necessary, and that's what Congress has done in 228 years.
That fact is just not remembered, but it's so critical to know what our true salvation is to get out of the military-industrial complex state, is get back to the Constitution and Congress being involved in making these decisions, not the executive branch.
Well, you know, it seems like the entire political center's reaction to Trump is like the crisis of Trump just lays everything so bare, where the worst things about him, the things that just cause absolute panic on the part of the national security state and all the media and everything, is that he would ever say something nice about getting along with Russia, the nuclear power that could wipe our civilization off the face of the planet, or that he would dare to deign to bless, somehow, Kim Jong-un with his presence, which automatically bestows the legitimacy of everyone who ever died for the American flag onto Kim Jong-un and gives him magical powers or whatever.
They go crazy against him for anything that smacks of peace at all, anything that sounds like a change from a state of crisis somewhere, and then the only time they ever really praised him at all was when he bombed Bashar al-Assad.
No, and they praised him for the mother of all bombs.
I remember there's one liberal commentator who said, oh, now he's become president.
He can be as bestial and savage as others, whether it was the mother of all bombs or whether he showed the rockets in Syria after the allegations of chemical warfare, one or the other.
That's when he really became president.
Can you imagine anything so obnoxious and revolting than saying you become president only when you kill other people?
Wow, that's quite something.
But with regard to the other elements, you're quite right on the money, Scott, with regard to the media and how it's become nothing but a cheerleader for war.
These are the same media that had no problem in Roosevelt, frankly, meeting with Joe Stalin.
Perhaps the worst mass murder ever.
I think he probably killed more than Adolf Hitler did.
When you count them up, it was perhaps not quite as maximum in death camps, but his extermination camps were more retail than wholesale like Hitler's, were Greek in rather grisly terms.
But hell, remember, midnight to Moscow, and the avuncular Joe Stalin, as long as he was working in conjunction with our empire, it's all fine to be able to do that.
And with regard to this idea, it's not only just with regard to Russia and North Korea.
They go apoplectic about, hey, why don't we just not put ourselves in a situation of a virtual war?
Remember Trump suggested, well, why should we be going over to war because Montenegro is attacked by Serbia or something?
This is crazy.
Why did NATO, when he suggested, well, what do we have this NATO agreement for anyway?
NATO is never going to help us if we're attacked, so why are we obligated to defend them, some of these countries who are totally irrelevant to the United States?
Oh, no, that's just terrible.
We're indispensable to the peace of the world that if Montenegro's borders, which are artificial anyway, it didn't even become a country until a few years ago when it seceded from Serbia, are penetrated.
Really?
I mean, I don't defend aggression, but we have to remember the founding fathers wanted to make clear that we wish freedom well everywhere, but we fight only to defend our own.
And the reason is because if we go to war all the time, we no longer have a republic.
We've got an empire, and we have a lawless state of affairs and secrecy and all the things that we try to get away from by overthrowing King George III.
But the media is really – and these are the media that went after Nixon in Vietnam.
This is the New York Times, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal.
They all stand and clap at any president that wants to walk away and make everybody an enemy of the United States.
All right, Shaul, that's Bruce Fine.
Check him out at the American Conservative Magazine.
Forget Trump.
The military-industrial complex is still running the show with Russia, and Trump wields signing statements.
Carves up defense bill is the latest there.
Thanks, Bruce.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Have a wonderful afternoon.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, Shaul, that's Bruce Fine.
Again, assistant deputy attorney general in the Ronald Reagan administration.
And did you know he helped draft the articles of impeachment against Bill Clinton?
Isn't that heroic?
All right, Shaul, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
