Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, Chaos, RadioAustin.org, LRN.
FM, Anomaly Radio.
And Elaine Castle is on the phone.
She's the author of The War on Civil Liberties and is a civil rights attorney, I think, in Washington, D.C., right, Elaine?
That's right, in Virginia.
In Virginia, okay.
And so I wanted to start right now, as hopefully I can sort of work a segue from the last interview, just finish wrapping up with Andy Worthington.
And he talked about how so many of these people were tortured and accused and kidnapped and hooded and God knows what, based on things that were beaten out of Abu Zubaydah that were never true in the first place.
And Abu Zubaydah, of course, was not a dangerous terrorist, but was a travel agent for Zawahiri or whatever and knew a bunch of guys.
And anyway, it reminded me of the story of Binyam Mohamed, the Ethiopian, who was tortured.
And in Morocco, it was revealed that they tortured him with razor blades, including on his, well, the parts that you would least like to have cut with a razor blade by a Moroccan CIA torturer.
And he made up the story and pointed the finger at Jose Padilla, which is one of the most outrageous abuses against the law and individual and Americans' rights in the history of the United States.
And it was all based on lies that were tortured out of this guy, Binyam Mohamed.
Now, he's free in the United Kingdom, but was seeking some justice in the American court system.
And then the Ninth Circuit Court, which, Elaine, as I understand it, is the nicest one, the leftist one when it comes to civil liberties issues in this country, told him that he wasn't even allowed to introduce unclassified material about what happened to him in order to get any justice.
Because I guess, you know, King Charles rules and he's got sovereign immunity and that's the end of that.
Is that basically the rules or what?
How does this work?
The law is that a judge can refuse to let any case go forward if, quote, state secrets, end quote, might be revealed.
And state secrets have been broadly construed.
The term can mean virtually anything you want it to mean, including the weather report.
So it's just a blanket grant of secrecy.
And further, the law does not require, although it allows if a judge wants to, but it does not require a judge to inquire in his or her chambers what the alleged state secrets are that would be disclosed.
And so judges who want to have a great mechanism for clearing their docket and not hearing a case by just saying state secrets, that's what the government says, case closed.
An occasional judge has said, OK, prosecutor, come and tell me in secret, whisper in my ear what the alleged state secrets are.
And in those cases, routinely the judge will say, oh, OK, defendant, state secret, I'm satisfied, case closed.
So it's just it's a horrible abuse.
It's a great way to totally get the government off the hook and get judges off the hook.
And it's just a travesty, a travesty of just to show you that there's very little justice when it comes to people that have claims against the government.
There's very little justice in the criminal justice system.
Well, now, Elaine, you seem to be saying that the judges, they're just in a hurry.
They just don't want to bother.
But, you know, I don't know.
Federalist paper number 10, right?
James Madison says, look, everybody's some kind of SOB or another.
So what you got to do is ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
We'll have the incentive structure set up where the judges get their thrill by making life miserable for the executive branch.
And that's how they get to be powerful, is to say no government.
I'm on the side of this little guy against you.
Screw you.
That's what's supposed to make a judge a judge, the independent judiciary and all that.
And yet now they're really just part of the federal government, like everybody else, I guess.
Well, of course they are.
I mean, they're they're federal employees and they have life terms and they can do whatever the heck they want to.
Absent some gross misconduct, they're they're not even going to have impeachment trials.
Well, there is an interesting impeachment trial going on right now and in Washington in the Senate against a federal judge, which is rare.
But it has to do with, you know, financial issues.
It's nothing that has to do with justice.
And and you can never you could never bring a judge up on charges that they didn't do something right in a case.
They have total immunity.
A judge, a judge has absolute immunity from suit for anything that they do in the course of being a judge.
Now, even if he outright even if he outright conspires with the prosecutor and the cops to frame up an innocent person.
Absolutely.
A judge, a judge, a judge has absolute and total 100 percent immunity from anything done that is remotely connected to their job as a judge.
Now, if they are accused of taking bribes, the financial thing, the law accepts that a judge should not take bribes.
But if a judge moves the case along, interprets evidence a certain way, rules this way or that way about something, whether it's torture or not, absolutely no suit.
I had a case that went to the Fourth Circuit where I sued a local judge who actually went out and told the cops to address to arrest a woman in town on trumped up charges.
And a woman against whom this judge had a vendetta, a personal vendetta.
And when I got to the Fourth Circuit, of course, I lost in the in the district court in Alexandria, took it to the Fourth Circuit and only one judge voted on my side.
The case decision which was reported and written up in the book was that, quote, although we don't really think what this person did was right.
What she did was a judicial act.
She signed off on an arrest warrant.
And that's what judges do.
So irrespective of the fact that she instituted it for personal reasons, the case was lost.
So that immunity, by the way, extends to prosecutors.
Prosecutors have absolute and total immunity from suit.
Now, for instance, you remember the lacrosse rape cases from Duke where the charges were trumped up?
Yeah.
And just for the audience, Elaine, let me say real quickly, they might remember William L. Anderson at LewRockwell.com and at his own site was on that case from the get go.
And there's a wonderful chronicle of just how horrible that thing was by William L. Anderson.
Just that's the name and lacrosse.
And you'll be filled in for sure.
So what happened as a result of that is, of course, you couldn't sue the prosecutor because he could bring whatever charge he wanted.
He did.
He had a witness who made all this up.
But so what?
The law says he can do that.
He did lose his law license.
OK, because the state bar of North Carolina found that, you know, I guess it was such an outrage in Duke, by the way, even though Duke had, first of all, just thrown these kids under the bus.
And but then, you know, the sort of the spare, the embarrassment to the to the institution, I think North Carolina kind of said, OK, we've got to do something about this rogue prosecutor.
In a way, you see that kind of got Duke off the hook because you remember it only Duke Duke canceled that whole season.
And by the way, I know something about this because my grandson plays lacrosse.
And not only that, but the N.C.
A.A. sanctioned Duke that year.
And now as a result of that, the N.C.
A.A. has had to cut Duke some slack in recruiting because everybody just went along with this prosecutor.
So the bottom line, that was his name, the rat.
OK, that's correct.
That's correct.
But you couldn't sue him.
In other words, the kids can't sue the prosecutor for what he did.
And again, that's why that's why I wanted to really emphasize William L. Anderson's work on this, because Nipong was acting criminally here.
He wasn't wrong.
You know, he had a criminal conspiracy to destroy the lives of innocent young men.
And he should have been in prison for it.
If they had done anything like what he was accusing them of, they'd have gone to prison.
Oh, absolutely.
But this ain't America no more, Elaine.
This is the homeland now.
Hang tight.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Elaine Castle after this.
OK.
You can watch the LRN Studio Cam and chat with other listeners anytime at cam.lrn.fm.
That's cam.lrn.fm.
All right, boys and girls, welcome back to the radio show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Wharton.
This is where I oppose everything, and I bring on the expert guest to make sure I understand those things right so I can oppose them correctly.
I'm talking with Elaine Castle.
She's the author of The War on Civil Liberties, and she knows of what she speaks.
She's a civil liberties attorney in Virginia and a longtime expert guest on this show.
And now, Elaine, I'm looking at a New York Times article, but it's by Charlie Savage and James Rison.
So hold your horses.
Don't just dismiss it out of hand.
It's got Savage's name on it.
I like that.
I like Savage.
I like Savage.
Yeah, yeah, no, he really is great.
And Rison has done some great work as well.
Excellent.
OK, so we won't hold the fact that they have the same banner as David Sanger and Michael Gordon against them.
Right.
OK, so here we have Federal Judge Finds NSA Wiretaps Were Illegal.
This is from March.
My friends here in the chat room sent this to me, and this is from, let's see, March 31st, 2010.
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency's program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration's effort to keep shrouded in secrecy.
One of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of counter US policies of George Bush.
Forty five page opinion said that they had violated FISA when it came to the case of the Al Haramain Foundation.
But this was not the Supreme Court case.
This was just a federal judge.
I'm certain that if I kept reading this thing, it would say the Obama administration appealed it.
Is there any progress on this case?
And can you fill us in on how it could be that a judge would ever say that the executive branch can't do whatever it wants?
Well, because the judge read the law and the evidence and decided that the case could go forward.
And so, of course, I'm assuming I mean, I'm sure by now if it was going to be appealed, it would be appealed by now.
But however, you're probably going to get the same problem and they're going to get into the state secret issue because you'll be asking them to disclose how and why they did what they did.
So I think that that's going to end up on the same road that you and I just talked about.
I think the so I don't think the answer is in the courts.
And I mean, the courts may go as far as they go.
But just like you just said, you know, this is what happens.
And if it doesn't happen in the even if even if in the district court, the court said this case could go forward against people who've been aggrieved.
And of course, you have to find people who actually know they have been aggrieved by the way.
Scott, you can't just file a blanket suit and say, you know, but that has been tried and people have lost.
You realize that people have already, you know, found gone through the issue of their surveillance, the lawyer, the Guantanamo and all this.
And when it's gotten to the gotten to the appellate court, the appellate court has kicked it back and said, we can't take this case because the state secret.
So, sure.
I mean, it's nice to know that a judge has validated what people have been telling us for years.
But it doesn't mean there's going to be any relief in the court system.
And I always go back to this.
The answer is not in the court system.
Even if even if you win a case, I mean, absent an injunction, let's say a court said to the president, you've got to stop this.
Right.
Because it's illegal.
Well, then that gets us back to the very thing that we went under with Nixon and with George Bush.
What do you do when the president violates the law?
Right.
Andrew Jackson said, Andrew Jackson said about the Trail of Tears.
John Marshall has made the law.
Let's see him enforce it.
On with the march to Oklahoma.
Exactly right.
So, I mean, you know that that's why I mean, that's why, you know, as a lawyer, I mean, the whole thing is it's I don't want to use the word fun lightly.
But I mean, it's interesting to read this and you shake your head and you say, well, OK, you know, now and now, you know, and a neutral party has agreed with what we knew.
But yet that's not going to change practice.
And I mean, look at what's going on in Guantanamo.
Those people are going to be there forever.
You've got people down there who are never going to get out.
Obama tried, I think, to close Guantanamo, but the Congress is never going to give them the money to to do it.
And so they're there.
It's going to sit.
So I think we're in I think we're in a sorry state.
What last was it yesterday or the day before The New York Times reported about all up into 2007, the illegal surveillance by the FBI into, you know, like green, green peace and, you know, PETA, you know, Protection Against Cruel Living Animals.
Well, you we've been reading these stories for 10 years that that the FBI has been infiltrating activist groups that are nonviolent.
And so there you have it again.
And finally, the inspector general, the Justice Department revealed that that is the case.
And and that Mueller, FBI director, lied to Congress when he said it wasn't going on.
Now, Mueller says, OK, I didn't know I was lying, but OK, so now so what?
Right.
So what?
They're still there.
I'm sure they're still there.
And, Scott, let me let me just interject and say what I said when I wrote my book way back, which was way too.
I mean, not that I ever consider myself an optimist, but I know I didn't go far enough.
But I made this point.
Once a president, any president has seized powers that have hitherto been off limits.
No other president is going to back off of that because what president would not want all of that power?
And Obama is the perfect example.
He has not given up anything.
Just like the state secrets is a perfect example.
The surveillance is a perfect example.
Every president and every time it goes by without challenge or like we just said, a president thumbs his nose at the law and says, screw you, come after me.
Right.
Like Bush did and Cheney.
Well, it becomes further entrenched.
And you know what?
It's never going to change.
It's only going to get worse.
And there's still the fear mongering continues today.
Did you read about how Newt Gingrich is now saying that Sharia law is taken over the federal courts?
Did you know that?
Jesus, are you kidding?
You know, I'm not kidding you.
Here's the thing about that guy.
Look, I'm not kidding you.
And he's on Fox News all night squealing it that the federal that the federal courts have been taken over by a cabal of Sharia of Sharia lawyers and judges.
Are you kidding me?
You've got to be kidding.
No.
Yeah.
Well, everybody knows that the liberals are really extremely conservative right wing Muslims.
Elaine, of course.
Right.
Well, I guess.
And that just goes to show right that you can fool some of the people all of the time.
And those are the ones you concentrate on.
And that's all.
I mean, nobody ever likes Newt Gingrich.
But I guess he figures, you know, if they don't know that he wrote the forward to the Toffler's work and stuff back then, and they just get scared enough by what he says, then they'll somehow give him power.
Scott, the number you need to go to The Washington Post today.
Tell your readers to go to The Washington Post dot com today.
Read two excellent articles, one by Eugene Robinson and one by Richard Cohen.
OK, both about one's about Gingrich and one's about witchcraft, witchcraft of the Republican Party.
We won't go into that.
But if you just go to Washington Post dot com and they are both on the op ed pages, Richard Cohen and Eugene Robinson must read both of those articles today as as with every day that passes.
More and more people believe that Obama is a Muslim, that Obama now, as Gingrich said, is what he's channeling his father that he didn't know.
And he's up to some voodoo African politics.
Listen, Fox News.
Hey, let's have a civil war, man.
Everybody just grab your rifles and start killing each other.
Everybody except the powerful people.
What we need to do is find somebody weak to pick on and pick on them.
And then you can feel like a big man.
It's Republicans under a spell is the article she's talking about.
Right.
It's really excellent.
And there is a Eugene Robinson on Gingrich.
Hey, can I keep you 10 more minutes here after the break?
Great.
I have so much more to talk to you about.
Thanks, everybody.
It's the Wayne Castle.
Listen, LRNFM on any phone, any time, 7 6 0 5 6 9 7 7 5 3.
That's 7 6 0 5 6 9 77 53.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's in our radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Elaine Castle.
And, you know, Lane, I got some specifics I'd like to ask you about.
But really, I kind of want to continue the conversation we're having sort of waxing philosophical there about the state of the union and so forth.
As we talk about all these specifics and the worst crimes that our government continues to get away with us libertarians, for example, over at antiwar dot com.
Our slogan is war is the health of the state, which comes from an essay by the great liberal writer Randolph Bourne on the eve of Woodrow Wilson's Holocaust in Europe back in the teens.
And his point was that during wartime, the state really comes into its own and it becomes the center of everything.
And executive power, of course, has to become the center of everything.
Foreign policy dominates domestic policy.
All you know, whether there's whether your road gets repaved is dependent on, you know, the killing of people on the other side of the planet and the different costs against each other there.
And on and on.
It's a wonderful essay.
And and I also like to recommend the heroic Robert Higgs, who wrote a book called Crisis and Leviathan.
And he calls it the ratchet effect where even if some of the power is given up and there are few examples of this, but they do exist, like William Harding's return to normalcy, where he said, you know, nuts to all this.
Edward Mandel House, Philip Drew, fascist tyranny.
Let's get back to the Republican form of government that we wanted to have and some peacetime and stay out of Europe's affairs.
We learned our lesson the hard way and and that kind of thing.
But the power never goes back to the way it was before the crisis.
You'd have a little bit of a repeal, a little bit of a return to normalcy, but never a real one.
But I would certainly agree with you that, you know, in the Obama years, he hasn't even tried to give up anything, really.
I guess he gave up the excuse that a president can do anything because he's on ordained by God to do so or by himself or whatever.
But he still just uses the authorization to use military force passed by the Congress after 9-11 to claim all of the exact same powers as George Bush.
So there's your ratchet effect.
And the next president will probably be a Republican.
It'll get worse.
And I'm sorry, I got one more thing to say as long as I'm going on like this, which is that it did not have to be this way.
And the American people had a chance.
And Ron Paul brought to them peace and liberty on a silver platter.
He goes, look, you don't have to be afraid.
You don't have to be broke and you don't have to be a slave.
Here is your bill of rights back.
Here is your son home from the war.
Let's do this.
And they told him, screw you.
And I like Sarah Palin because I like her glasses and some crap.
And so, you know, in general, the American people really deserve what they get, which is the how all empires fall.
The state takes it out on the people who supported it all along.
That's the way I look at it.
Yep.
Pretty depressing.
That sucks because, you know, I'm an individualist, too.
And there's a lot of innocent people like you and me get caught up in our neighbors falling.
You know, a fair.
Yep.
Good.
Well, here's an example, to be specific, of what we're talking about.
And that was the dueling speeches by Barack Obama and Dick Cheney, where Obama went and showed up, stood in front of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution at the National Archives and defended himself from the right wing attack that he was, you know, adopting a weak posture towards the evil terrorists at Guantanamo, et cetera.
And I guess, you know, surface appearances would be that Obama stood up for the Bill of Rights, Elaine.
But, you know, how did that what did he really say in that speech?
Why is Guantanamo still open?
Because the Congress will not authorize the funds.
But he could get it done.
He's the freaking president.
Well, I don't I don't know.
Harry Reid can't stop Barack Obama.
Well, I think it's because they didn't force the filibuster.
It was a fight that the Democrats didn't want to fight.
The Republicans threatened filibuster.
And instead of saying, OK, go ahead, we're going to put it up to a vote, because I'm sure the Democrats won't, especially not now.
The Democrats don't have the votes that they're going to put their necks on the line to close Guantanamo when they'll be screeching there.
You know, the Republicans are going to defeat them on it or their their constituents don't understand, even if they are Democrats, why Guantanamo should be closed.
So I think that it was a political, politically untenable position for the Democrats to put their necks out for Congress.
That's my son.
That's my view of it.
OK.
And and and whether or not Obama could.
I don't know how he could.
The prisons remember that there was like all the states in the country, except there was Ohio saying we're not going to take them.
Illinois, I guess.
Right.
Well, yeah, I know somebody remember how all the governors and started to gang up and say, you're not going to you're not going to bring any, quote, terrorist to our state.
Remember how the congressman said they were going to pass a law that or the Republicans.
But again, I mean, the counterfactuals right there, Ron Paul would have said nuts to you.
I don't care about that.
The law is the law and we're going to do it.
And how do you like that?
He's not the president.
I know, but I'm just saying the counterfactual, like how it could have been is it's obvious, you know, the and in fact, you know, Glenn Greenwald did a piece where I forget the original piece he was highlighting, but where they quoted Rahm Emanuel and the political guys talking about the thing we want to do for world opinion and our Democratic base is make it appear that we're trying to close Guantanamo without really trying to close Guantanamo.
They admitted that out loud in English in order with a period at the end.
Yeah.
So, yeah, well, there's your ratchet effect.
Crisis and Leviathan run out and get it.
And the war on civil liberties, as you said, this is the exact point that you make.
It's been my point.
I called it a war.
That's what I call it.
A war.
Scott, they call it a war so they can have all that power.
That's what I wrote about.
And others have written about it.
It's a stupid thing to call it a war.
Why are we in Afghanistan where there's a hundred Al Qaeda members there?
We got a hundred thousand troops, right?
Because it's power, because it's money.
And so what people have to start realizing is don't don't look at this as if it's don't look at this as if this is logical and it makes sense.
This I mean, this is more witchcraft.
This is democratic witchcraft.
It's everybody's witchcraft.
It's voodoo.
You know, it's mumbo jumbo.
But we know why people fight wars.
And if you haven't seen it, go see that great documentary.
Why we fight, why we fight.
Have you seen that documentary?
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
Eugene's Iraqi, right?
It is.
Yes.
Well, it's back to Eisenhower's warning about the military industrial conflicts.
We fight because of money, money, money, money, money drives it.
And so, you know, it's like take off your glasses, rose colored glasses and stop thinking like there's, you know, there's things are being done for for the reasons that are on the surface.
It's all bull, you know, and it's a way for a lot of people to make a lot of money.
And the rest of the people who aren't making a lot of money, except those who are fighting the war and paying for it, like you and I paying for the war and the troops that are fighting it.
And the poor guys go sign up because they can't get jobs doing it or else.
Right.
So it's a great, great recruiting market now.
But the people that are planning the war and executing the war are doing it for reasons of power and money.
And that's as simple as that.
And I think that that that documentary is just powerful.
And so you and I run into trouble when we try to dwell in the realm of logic and insist upon justice and adherence to the rule of law, et cetera.
I mean, I think those times are so far gone in this country.
I mean, I don't I don't think as you see what difference to the Democrats, especially what few gains the Democrats made a couple.
Right.
With legislation.
Now they're trying to all take it back and kick it back.
I didn't vote for I didn't want the stimulus.
I didn't want health care reform.
I mean, I mean, I mean, and they're falling all over themselves trying to discredit and disassociate themselves from everything they've done so that they can get themselves reelected.
And of course, they're going to lose anyway.
Right.
But the dishonesty of that and that the proof that the only reason they're there is to protect themselves and keep getting their salary in there, you know, they'll help kill.
Well, there it is.
Where are the people of principle?
There are a damn few of them, right?
Yeah.
In Washington and anywhere.
I mean, you can count them on one hand now.
Well, that's the thing, really.
Are going to lose.
It's in the public imagination.
That big marble statue of Abraham Lincoln is the guy in charge up there or something.
We have these institutions that we believe in somehow to be the arbiters of how violence is distributed in our society.
And, you know, it's it reminds me of Lysander Spooner back of the great abolitionist individualist anarchist.
After the Civil War, he wrote no treason, the Constitution of no authority.
And he said, look, the Constitution has either created such a government as we have had or it's been unable to prevent it.
In either case, it is unfit to exist.
Hamilton and those guys got it wrong.
Maybe the Articles of Confederation would have worked out better.
Maybe we could have done something else.
But this has been an absolute disaster.
Six hundred thousand people killed.
You know, what are we doing here?
And so, you know, I think if D.C. just sunk into the ocean, we didn't have all those neat marble statues that these politicians have built to themselves to kind of reinforce the civic religion of the legitimacy of this government.
We might just realize that, hey, we could all live in peace and harmony, more or less, between Canada and Mexico with without a national government at all.
Why do we need them at all?
Why can't we just have a free trade agreement between states and a foreign policy of Switzerland and then leave it at that and be happy and rich?
I mean, I don't know.
It seems so obvious to me.
But then again, I'm a lunatic.
So, well, yeah, that's right.
You're arguing from logic and the rule of law.
And that's not where we're at.
No, I'm afraid not.
Well, listen, history will record that some of us tried to at least call the score on the way down the hill.
So you'll definitely have a place on the list, Elaine.
You do great work.
And I really appreciate all the things that you've done on all the time you've spent on the show over the years so far and future time as well.
Anytime.
Thank you, Elaine.
Everybody, that's Elaine Castle, civil liberties attorney in Virginia and author of The War on Civil Liberties.
That's how Bush and Ashcroft have destroyed the Bill of Rights.
