09/24/13 – Dan Johnson – The Scott Horton Show

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Our next guest on the show today is Dan Johnson from Panda, People Against the NDAA.
Welcome to the show.
How's it going?
I'm doing great, Scott.
Yourself?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us.
And I'm sorry, I think I had it somewhere.
What is exactly your title here at Panda?
I am the founder and national director of the organization.
National director.
Founder and national director.
All right.
I better write that down so I can say that at the end correctly.
Founder and national director.
All right.
So, first of all, first and foremost, tell us about the NDAA and spare no expense on detail here.
Sure.
So, the NDAA itself is usually just a military spending bill.
It's been passed for, I believe, 51 years by our Congress and signed by the president every year.
However, the NDAA became a very large, very expensive bill, and in doing so, became the perfect haystack to start throwing needles in, especially after 9-11.
So, in 2007, the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act authorized a military unit to operate on U.S. soil, only on U.S. soil, and for civil disobedience and crowd control purposes.
And then, although that was later repealed in 2009, it set the stage for the 2012 NDAA, which essentially authorizes the indefinite military detention without a charge and without a trial of any person around the world, including an American citizen, who is merely suspected of committing a belligerent act or directly supporting associated forces of the Taliban or al-Qaeda, which, of course, the government can't define, and who is simply accused of it since they will not get a trial, and odds are they will not even be charged.
Also, it allows the application of the laws of war, which is how they justify this.
They say America is a battlefield, and it allows the application of the laws of war, which includes torture, which includes execution, which includes rendition to a foreign country, which includes military trials, all to American citizens, violating only a little 14 provisions of our Constitution.
Right.
Right.
Well, and they've already shown how willing they are to militarize what is essentially a law enforcement issue, as Jacob Warnberger never tires of pointing out.
Terrorism's a crime.
It's been on the books for a long time.
Didn't declare war against even the guys that did it in the case of the Oklahoma bombing.
It's prosecuted two of them, you know what I mean?
Put them in jail.
That's what you do with terrorists.
You don't go to war, especially not in your own country.
Right.
Right.
But, you know, we've prosecuted over 300 cases of terrorism.
Glad you brought that up.
We prosecuted over 300 cases of terrorism through our civilian courts, but we haven't even prosecuted 30 through military courts.
And we're saying that these guys should be put under the military's law of war instead of the civilian courts, which have actually been doing this.
Right.
And of course, as we know, the vast majority of those in the civilian courts are people who are perfectly innocent, trumped up on some financial charges, or in fact, entrapped and goaded by some well-paid government informant into saying something stupid into a microphone or that kind of thing.
And they still have no problem convicting them whatsoever.
So they really don't need to worry about whether the court system is effective.
The federal court system is effective at locking up the people the executive branch wants locked up, you know?
They don't.
And which makes it even more concerning that they would take such a step as to give the military jurisdiction over American citizens and over people here on American soil.
All right, now, so hang on a second, because I'm pretty sure I read something at the Daily Coast that said that you must be some coop because Obama put a signing statement on the thing that says that he never means to apply this to American citizens.
And you must have just read that wrong.
I mean, you got a J and a I confused or something, because it doesn't say that he can do this to us.
Or as Oklahoma Congressman Lankford put it to a protester, you just got that bill off the Internet.
No, he would apply it to American citizens.
And here's why.
In his signing statement, first of all, he said he has the power, but he won't use it.
Well, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts, absolutely, last I checked.
And so he's admitting he has the power.
And should the executive branch even have that power?
I believe constitutionally they should not.
And secondly, America leads the country, or leads the world, really, in how many times we've utilized the law for our own citizens.
In 1862, under Proclamation 94, Abraham Lincoln said all those who are disloyal to the northern government will be placed under military jurisdiction.
And we detained 15,000 northerners, executed several of them.
And the Supreme Court said, look, most of those guys were innocent.
You shouldn't have done that.
Well, we didn't learn our lesson.
So in 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed Executive Order 9066, saying military child jurisdiction over certain areas of the country.
And 120,000 Japanese Americans were detained.
So to say it couldn't happen here, or he wouldn't use it here, is to ignore how history repeats itself.
All right.
Now, am I correct about this, that we have the time, if you need to, and you can, if you have a computer in front of you, and you can actually quote the exact language to prove your point, or whatever, we have the time for that, if it comes to that.
It's fine with me, if you can.
But I seem to remember reading, and I don't have this in front of me, but I seem to remember reading a Glenn Greenwald article at Salon.com, back when this was passed, and would have been late 2011, that said that Obama himself was the one who pushed to make sure, and his allies in the Senate, on his instruction, made sure that the offending language was in there.
Because there was actually an outcry in the first place, before it was ever even passed.
There was a controversy about this.
And that it was the White House that made sure that this language stayed.
And then, only then does he turn around, and then he adds this signing statement, saying, oh, but don't worry, I promise never to enforce that part of it.
So first of all, is that correct?
And then, can you really show me exactly where it says, yes, including Dave and his little sister, if that's what the President wants?
Sure.
Let's go into the statements made by Senator Carl Levin on the Senate floor, when the NDA was being passed.
He said, quote, the language which precluded the application of Section 1031, which later became Section 1021 in the final bill, but Section 1031 to American citizens, was in the bill that we originally approved in the Armed Services Committee.
And the administration asked us to remove the language which says U.S. citizens and lawful residents would not be subject to this section.
Close quote.
He is right.
He received a letter from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta a few days before that, which said, quote, we recognize your efforts to address some of our objections in Section 1032.
However, it continues to be the case and advantages that permanent defense in particular and our national security in general in Section 1032 of requiring that certain individuals be held by the military are at best unclear.
This provision restrains the executive branch's option to utilize in a swift and flexible fashion all the counterterrorism tools that are legally available.
This is the letter that was sent to Carl Levin from the Obama administration saying that we want you to include American citizens in this language.
Now how are they actually included?
Let's go to the actual language of the bill.
We're going to assume that this bill, most bills, in fact, it would be right to assume most bills Congress passes affect American citizens.
So instead of saying that we need to find somewhere where it shows it affects American citizens, that should be an automatic assumption.
Congress passes a bill, it affects American citizens.
We make bills, make laws for our country, usually, not the rest of the world.
And so where I want to point out is where they tried to take American, or supposedly tried to take American citizens out.
Under Section 1022D1, the requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States.
Well, that's interesting because it seems at first glance that, you know, the requirement to detain doesn't extend and that we're not affected by this bill.
However, what does it say?
The requirement to detain.
If they wanted American citizens to be excluded, they would have said, just literally said, this doesn't apply to American citizens.
But they said the requirement to detain does not extend.
You remove the requirement, what do you have left?
An option.
Right.
And so the fact that they put this language in the bill, the fact they put this language in here, says that it does apply to American citizens and the fact that this doesn't exclude them further proves it applies to American citizens.
Boy, it sure sounds like it to me.
Read them and weep, everybody.
That's how they get you.
And you know what?
Ever since my very first vote when I voted against George W. Bush when I was a kid, I remember reading all the double talking, the bond issues, all the yes or no's, where yes means no and no means yes, and I guess really no means yes more than anything.
You got to be careful.
These lawyers and their legalese, they'll get you.
But it sure sounds like you've got the discrepancy sure ironed out there, unfortunately.
I mean, it is unfortunate.
And the main point about this, and Judge Catherine Forrest of the Fourth District Court of New York said this very clearly.
It's like, look, the NDAA and the point of NDAA section, the detention provision, the covered persons are too vague.
And when indefinite detention, possible indefinite military detention is on the line, you cannot have a bill with such vague language.
Right.
Well, and, you know, I was going to say, because, you know, and please talk about the Associated Forces.
And there's a whole lawsuit going on just on, I think, on those grounds, the Associated Forces ground, the Ellsberg thing.
But I just wanted to remark real quick about, you know, what they consider war crimes.
If we use Guantanamo Bay as an example of their military justice, they've abandoned the old traditional military court martial system for this kind of thing.
And it's all ad hoc since now, I guess, the Military Commission's Act of 2009 version of how to do this stuff.
But the convictions for war crimes that they've gotten so far have been against an innocent kid, against a cook and bin Laden's driver.
And this is what they call, you know, they just stretch material support for terrorism, which doesn't really mean anything.
Hell, if it doesn't apply to John McCain, but it does apply to Omar Khadr, then there's no definition at all.
And and then they call it not just a crime, but it's a war crime.
And so we already see the angle that they have on this.
It's sort of like if they want to get you for mail fraud, they'll get you just for checking the mail.
You know what I mean?
They'll get you for anything.
They will.
And when you give, I saw a great quote one time, and it said, when you give someone an inch, they'll think they're a ruler.
And it really brings home the fact that you cannot give government, even the legal authority, and to say they'll never use it, I think it's fallacy.
But let's say you think they'll never use it.
You cannot give them the legal authority.
You don't want to ever give them legal authority to violate your right, that that is not they they don't care about you.
And that's the best way to say it is they are.
They don't follow the rule of law in the first place.
And when you put a law in place that condones their actions, because, for example, Anwar al-Awlaki and his son, Abdurahman al-Awlaki, killed two weeks apart in two separate drone strikes in Yemen, both American citizens, were killed because the president claimed he had the authority to do so.
Nothing else.
The president claimed he had the authority to kill them, and then he just did.
The NBAA then goes and says, yeah, you had that authority, here's your legal backing for that.
And they're attempting to go back in time with it and justify it.
Like they did with the NSA wiretapping of the Bush era with their Vice Amendments Act.
They just legalized it after the fact.
And ex post facto law, which last I checked was illegal, so according to our Constitution.
Well, the thing is not self-enforcing.
There's no teeth in any of that.
It's up to us.
And exactly.
And so this gets us to the real point, which is your organization and what you're doing about it.
And the answer is something is actually happening.
You are doing something about it.
Please go on at length.
Sure.
I founded PANDA, People Against the NBAA, on January 29, 2012, with a couple of the college students.
And we, the next month, went to our city council and tried to get them to say no to this.
I figured it was a no-bringer.
The military is claiming they could possibly indefinitely detain someone.
It's a no-bringer for you just to pass something that says, no, they won't do it here.
But the response we got back was that you students should have taken, you should basically go back to basic government class, was the thing I got from my mayor.
And the thing I got from my city council was, how would you do something you can actually have an effect on?
In that type of condescending tone.
And so you have a choice.
You can choose to give up at that point, because they didn't pass it, and, you know, I tried.
Or you can choose to say, you know what, you're the people, so I'm going to prove wrong.
And I chose option B. So PANDA has, since that point, become the largest organization, the leading organization in the country fighting the NBAA.
We have a little over 30 state teams nationwide.
We have introduced probably about 20 pieces of legislation in different states.
And we currently have active legislation in Albany, New York, and in a couple other counties.
And we're going at a local level.
Because imagine government corruption as a pyramid.
At the top, all the money.
Whoever's controlling the money at the top, you can call the banking cartel, you can call them the syndicate, whatever.
And then below them, you have the federal government, you have the executive, legislative, judicial.
Below them, you have the states.
And below them, you have the city and local government.
And then you have the street level bureaucrats.
Just below them.
Well, if you're going to affect real change, don't go to the top of the pyramid and knock the top off.
Somebody will walk up that pyramid of corruption and place a new top on.
That's what happened in Egypt.
Notice, Egypt has had massive, massive protests in the streets, twice.
And where are they today?
They still are under military control, and the military is going out, and they're going to war, essentially, with mercy supporters.
Not to say either side's right, but they didn't win.
They didn't get the change they wanted.
And so in America, if we're going to have the change we want, we need to start at the bottom.
We need to pull brick by brick by brick by brick out from under this pyramid until we reach 51%, and then it falls.
And then the center of gravity loses center of gravity.
And so you can bring real change at a level, and not only that, at a level you can actually affect.
You sending a letter to your congressman, I'm sorry, it doesn't work.
They don't listen.
You sending a letter to your state representative, much better.
You going into your city council and telling your city council how you want that city to run, that matters.
That really matters.
And so we're going at a city level, we're going at a county level, we're going somewhat at the state level to stop this egregious piece of legislation from ever being enforced.
First with law, second with enforcement telling them about the law, and finally, we the people are the final bastion.
We must stand and we must stay in the area and watch them and make sure they keep their oath.
Right.
Well, and see, this is the thing, it's sort of just like with the shouting down of the war on Syria two weeks ago.
It is really a case study, really interesting to see the politicians, most of them, they're not very deep individuals, they're ambitious, but that's about it.
And you get them in a situation where their phone is literally ringing off the hook and everybody on the other line is determined and opposed to the terrible thing they're trying to do.
I can really make a big impression on them that like, wow, I mean, then again, the leadership told them, hey, it's a conscience vote.
Go ahead and you don't have to vote for it if you don't want to kind of thing.
And maybe it would have been a bit different if they played it a bit different.
But you know, it's not nothing.
The fact that all these guys went to all their town hall meetings and all their staff told them that every email is opposed here.
And it's just the consensus of the people is no, we don't want to.
It could be that very same no consensus on, come on, issues like the NDAA.
I mean, if we can't all come together and agree on that, assuming we're informed on what the issue is, if we can't all agree on that, we ought to just hang it up and just call ourselves Canadians or something.
At this point, I mean, really, the NDAA, although it is a tyrannical piece of legislation, it's almost been a godsend because it is an issue that affects every person who is politically active, regardless of what party you are.
And regardless of what party you are, your elected leaders voted this in 93-7 in the Senate.
So it's us versus them.
It's we the people versus the political, I'll call them the political class.
And so it's really been a godsend because we need to unite.
There aren't enough people on the right or on the left to fix this problem.
We have to unite and say enough.
We've had enough of this.
And that's the way we're going to really bring our country back to the principles that it was founded on into a real government, which was instituted to protect our rights, bringing it back to that point.
Yeah.
And, you know, I mean, this is the whole thing.
This is really why I keep doing this is because I am, despite everything, I am still hopeful that we really do have a consensus, again, among the people, not those with power, but among the people that the system, even though it'll never be great and perfect or whatever, it's supposed to work toward, you know, making sure the trials are fair, making sure that, you know, if we send our guys off to war, it was only because we really had to.
And, you know, some of these just very kind of basic assumptions about what's right and how things are supposed to work around here.
I think, you know, Americans generally agree about all that.
And if we can put it in, you know, a bit more specific terms, like what we need is peace, you know, to abandon our empire and to reinstate the Bill of Rights before we never have any more of it ever again.
I think that we can rally people around that.
I think that even if people don't know what's in the Bill of Rights, they know they like it.
And if you tell them what's in it, they go, yeah, that's right.
That's right.
I like that.
You know what I mean?
The ban on torture, the promise of a lawyer and a actual chance at proving your innocence, if not, you know, at least just having to cast doubt on your guilt.
You know what I mean?
Absolutely.
And it's really our fault, which means it's our responsibility, which also means we can fix it.
It's your responsibility.
You can fix it.
And it's we the people's fault.
We the people have let this down.
The politicians eventually have to, have to, eventually answer to us.
And so it's we the people who have fallen asleep at the wheel.
And if we the people go back at it, because it's our fault in the first place, we can fix it.
Yeah.
Well, and I think, you know, what goes on too is we get accustomed to things.
It's hard to go back to the mentality, remember back the mentality of 2002, 2003, when everybody's still in the middle of reacting.
But, you know, it doesn't take too much imagination to think of somebody putting a nuke in one of our harbors, blowing up one of our, you know, harbor cities on the East or West Coast or the Gulf Coast or something.
And what the reaction might be then, oh, everything changed on December 13th when the nuke went off.
And then, you know, probably wouldn't be Dan Johnson or Scott Horton who were first to go to the camp.
Although we may have been sticking our neck out a little bit far on this one.
But no, most likely it would be American Muslims and immigrants and people who have not even a semblance of political power who would be rounded up, would be the victims of this.
And it's a very real possibility.
You know, like you were saying, it's hard to invoke the Civil War so long ago.
It's almost a fairy tale or something.
But just, you know, like World War Two and the Japanese internment, or even just the way that John Ashcroft rounded up thousands of people under the pretext of a material witness warrant after September 11th.
That could have gone really bad right there.
You know what I mean?
It could have kept all those guys.
The if the government, you know, your principles, your principles are tested in times of crisis, not in times in your average, your normal day.
Your principles are tested in times of crisis.
And if our government gives up its principles in times of crisis, we need to get rid of the people in our government.
Yeah.
Well, I sure appreciate this.
And now can you tell us again, how many states was it that you said where you guys have, I don't know, was it legislation introduced or at least an activist group working on it or what?
We had introduced legislation in over 20 states, somewhere between 20 and 22.
And the very fact that it's being introduced is, is what's amazing here.
Yeah, that is huge.
That is really a big deal.
Yeah.
Again, that alone is just a huge PR stunt toward building a real consensus, building awareness of the issue and a real consensus about I mean, wow, you're really doing good work there.
I had missed that when you said 20 before.
That's great.
I wouldn't necessarily say a PR stunt so much as it's educating the legislators on the issue.
It's teaching them that this is the time they need to say we've had enough and interpose against a rogue federal government.
So, but it's not a PR stunt, but what it is, is this type of legislation has not been introduced to my knowledge since segregation period.
That's been a long time.
It's been a very long time and it was used for evil back then, but today it can be used for good.
And we haven't, the state, the counties, cities haven't done this in a long, long time.
So to see this standing up, to see this, them saying enough, that's important.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, that's the thing too, is more and more as the 10th Amendment Center guys like to point out, you have issues that are, you know, so-called left, right type issues like drugs here, guns there, NDAA all around where there's, there's plenty going on DC for all sides to be sick and tired of their tyranny and for this kind of interposition.
So we're all out of time, but thank you again for your time on the show today, Dan, and best of luck to you.
This is great work and I hope people will help support.
Again, the website here is pandaunite.org and that's Dan Johnson, founder and national director.
Appreciate it.
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