11/13/07 – Gordon Prather – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 959 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton and this is Antiwar Radio.
We in this together, son, your beef is mine.
As time goes by, an eye for an eye.
We in this together, son, your beef is mine.
So long as the sun shines to light up the sky.
We in this together, son, your beef is mine.
Let me start from the beginning at the top of the list.
You know what I mean, have a situation like this.
Another war story from a thirsty young hustler.
Won't trust her, I'd rather bust her.
And leave you caught for the cops to discover.
I be vibbin' in the Range Rover, all too well, like Liberace.
You watch me, my dick's tryna knock me and block me.
But I be on the low, sippin' I.C.
D.
Spumante.
Niggas try to creep on the side of my teeth.
Stuck in heat through the window, rocked their ass for sleep.
Over a three pack, it was a small thing, really.
I keep lettin' them small things fly to be a failure.
If I'm out of town, one of my crew will take care of ya.
The world is ours, and your team's inferior.
You wanna bust caps, I get all up in your area.
Kidnappin' children make the situation scarier.
Life is a gamble, we scramble for money.
I might crack a smile, but ain't the damn thing funny.
I'm caught up in the dirt with your hands, get money.
Plus the outcome turns out to be lovely.
Got cheese in my pocket, hit off my main squeeze.
Push back, the sun grew, let the cold air breeze through the water.
Saw a feather up on the street, but mostly.
Keep the gat closely, cause niggas wanna toast me.
And yo, I gotta get mine, no matter what the cause.
Consequences, countin' my blessings out of my weapons.
Cop out the gat and let my nine serve purpose.
Sling through my thing, organized things, service.
Tryna make a meal of stress, you know the deal.
So we sling thrills, get your cap held.
Cause everything is real, cause I wanna chill.
Laid up in a jacuzzi, sip of bubbly with my fingers on the hoozie.
Try to infiltrate my four-kit car, dead up in New York.
My pain is back in criminal thoughts, get your life lost.
Never found a gear, my friend, mission completed.
Watch you drop in less than ten, on my road to the riches.
Hittin' snitches off with mad stitches.
Your last rest of the place will be your ditch, kid.
No one can stop me, tryin' your styles sloppy.
You wanna be me, you're just an imitation copy.
My theme is all about makin' the green.
Livin' up in luxury, pushin' fat whips to live comfortably.
Time goes by, and I, far and I.
We in this together, son, your beef is mine.
So long as the sunshine can light up the sky.
We in this together, son, your beef is mine.
A drug dealer's dream, stash cream, keys on a triple beam.
Five hundred SL green, ninety-five nickel-blame condominium.
Thug dressed like a gentleman, tailor-made ostrich.
Chanel for my women, friend, murderin'.
Numbers on your head while I'm burglarin'.
Shank is servin' them, what's up to all my niggas?
Swervin' in New York metropolis.
The bridge brings apocalypse, shoot at the clouds.
Feels like the holy beast is watchin' us.
Mad man, my sanity is goin' like an hourglass.
Gun inside my bad hand, I slice tryna bag rams.
I got hoes that used to milk you, niggas who coulda killed you.
It's down with my ill crew of psychos.
Nas Escobar movin' on your weak production.
Pumpin' corruption in the third world, we just bustin'.
Hold up and analyze the wild cats.
Sling cracks, they swingin' axes.
The new routines, be my eyes blacks.
Playin' corn, it's glancin' all up in your cornea.
Cornia, seen cats snatch, money's upon ya.
But late night, candlelight fiend with a crap ride.
It's only right, feelin' higher than an airplane ride.
Word, yo, I wanna get this money then blow.
Take my time, blast a nine if your front get gold.
Sip beers, the German ones, hand my guns to sons.
Shaolin and Queensbridge, we robbin' niggas for fun.
But still, right my will, I'll turn my seeds then build.
Mahalia, sing a tale, but the real, we still kill.
It's time goes by, and not for an eye.
We in this together, so your beef is mine.
So long as the sun shines to light up the skies.
We in this together, so your beef is mine.
It's time goes by, and not for an eye.
We in this together, so your beef is mine.
So long as the sun shines to light up the skies.
We in this together, so your beef is mine.
It's mine.
Way back, world out, just bless him with the bulletproof.
More bait, nice, chef creation, folio nation, yeah.
Alright, y'all welcome to Anti-War Radio and Chaos Radio 92.7, 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I am your host, Scott Horton, thanks for listening.
Here's some websites, antiwar.com.
Your best place to find all the news, everything important going on in the world.
All day, every day, updated in real time, all day, every day.
It happens to be fundraising time.
We do it once a quarter at antiwar.com, so if you like what you hear here and read there, then why not stop by antiwar.com and chip in, every little bit helps.
I know everybody gave all their money to Ron Paul this month, so hopefully somebody's got a little bit of money left to keep antiwar.com going.
Anyway, so there's that.
Go to antiwar.com, find out what the hell's going on for real, as opposed to what it was they said on TV, which isn't right, you know, depending on the topic, but you know what I mean.
Yeah, so then that's that, antiwar.com.
My own websites are scotthortonshow.com.
I have archives of about 400 of my radio interviews, I deal with anti-government, antiwar guests, and my own blog is thestressblog.com.
You can get anti-government propaganda for the back of your car, the right is wrong, the left is stupid, and other wonderful slogans like that at libertystickers.com, and you can also find me on MySpace and Facebook if you look around there.
All right, so that's it for websites.
This is Antiwar Radio, and here in a few, we'll be talking with Dr. Gordon Prather, who's all about nuclear weapons, and we're going to talk about the axis of evil, and the proliferation of atomic bombs, and Iran, and North Korea policy, and so forth, with the esteemed Dr. Prather.
He's not a doctor like Ron Paul, where he, you know, delivers babies, and that kind of thing.
He's a nuclear physicist kind of doctor, and he used to make nuclear bombs and test them, and disassemble them when their shelf life was up, and everything else, in fact, he used to work for senators, for Pete Domenici, and I forget the other ones.
He was the chief scientist of the Army, and really is a serious expert on all things nuclear weapons.
He writes for us every weekend at antiwar.com, and I've found him to be an incredible resource, so...
Anyway, here's to looking forward to that.
I mentioned Ron Paul, I might as well also go ahead and mention, it's more than a month away now, but on December 16th is the next plot to have a bunch of people all give Ron Paul money in one day.
It's a celebration of the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.
And, by the way, they keep saying, Ron Paul's in the money, Ron Paul's pulled in a ton of money, Ron Paul, boy, he's got all this money.
And that's true.
But, I would be heartbroken if I thought that people out there were getting the impression somehow that that was all Lockheed money.
In fact, I even said, hey, guess what?
My favorite candidate, Ron Paul, yeah, he raised $4.3 million, and this girl said, ugh, that's horrible, ugh, that's disgusting.
Because she immediately assumed that that meant a bunch of millionaires had all kicked down.
That whichever candidate I was talking about now no longer had a will of his own, but was the tool of some corporate interests.
And I said, no, no, no, it was 38,000 individual donors.
21,000 of them knew.
All of them just individuals.
The average donation was just over $100.
And it wasn't Lockheed and Northrop Grumman and Raytheon and those guys.
In fact, I would guess that if you were to see anybody who worked for those companies, it's either hardcore geek engineers who are libertarians even though they work for Northrop Grumman, or it's a plot to make it look like Ron Paul's getting money from the military-industrial complex or something.
But he's the only one who calls them that in this presidential campaign, and it isn't just a talking point or a salesmanship.
He wants to take all of their welfare away, all of it.
He told the Washington Post, he could defend this country with a couple of good submarines.
I don't think he means to abolish the entire Navy, but there wouldn't be much of a military-industrial complex to suck off of for Northrop Grumman and them in the future.
And by the way, they have already maxed out, or maybe it's per candidate, I don't know.
They've all given to Hillary Clinton.
In fact, just Google Hillary Clinton and Lockheed and see what you find.
She's flying around the country for free in a Lockheed plane.
How do you like that?
Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, there was a great one that ran in the Independent.
I think it was reprinted on Alternet about how the military-industrial complex has dropped the Republicans and switched to Hillary Clinton.
And there they went through.
Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Lockheed, and everybody who makes weapons for the government and sells them at 500% markups from what they would cost in any sort of free market since.
I don't know if there could be a free market for bombers and stuff like that.
But anyway, I think it's important for people to know that.
Yes, Dr. Paul raised a lot of money, but it wasn't from a bunch of fat cats.
In fact, if you look at the polling in New Hampshire, you see he's at 12% or 15% or something.
I think it was 15% among those who make less than $50,000 a year.
The people who make more than that oftentimes have their own identity so wrapped up in the state even if they're not directly receiving government subsidies like most rich people do.
Isn't there a whole myth in this country that it's the poor people who suck up all the welfare?
We all know that's not true.
Don't get me wrong.
All welfare is pure evil because it's stealing.
It's not okay for you to mug somebody, is it?
Well, it's not okay for you to hire a cop to mug somebody for you either.
And that goes for you who makes less than $10,000 a year out there and for you who makes a billion dollars a year or some of these people with their $100 million salaries, the various CEOs and COOs of these military industrial complex corporations.
They're just on the dole, is all they are, and that is a shameful thing, a terribly shameful thing.
In fact, I think it's a shameful thing for anyone to be a government employee of any description.
Maybe a fireman, but even then, do you really need government in order to have fire protection?
I never understood that.
We all want fires put out.
Why is it we have to have people with guns go around and collect the money?
In fact, all over Texas at least there are volunteer fire departments where there's no strong arming involved at all.
But why should there ever be strong arming involved in fire protection?
I never understand why people love government so much.
No, the millionaires and the billionaires in this country who make their money with their hand in the U.S. Treasury, they're the biggest threat.
It's not the poor people on welfare.
Although I would argue and would win the argument if I bothered to get into it that welfare is terrible for poor people and welfare makes people poor and it's a damn disaster just like everything government tries to do.
Private charity is much better in many, many ways.
But besides all that, stealing is stealing.
But the larger point is that here's Dr. Ron Paul.
I think this is what I was talking about.
Here's Dr. Ron Paul who wants to destroy the military industrial complex.
Yeah, he made a lot of money, but he made it from a lot of people like me who had not much money laying around.
I'm one of those who helped the average be down near 100 because I donated far less than that on November the 5th.
But anyway, it's the people like me who know about rich people on welfare and don't like it and support Ron Paul for that reason, we're the ones who gave them the money.
Not a bunch of people who are already rich from sucking off the rest of us.
So I just thought that point ought to be enunciated clearly since in fact it was my next door neighbor's girlfriend.
She said, yeah, Ron Paul raised all this money.
She went, oh, no, ugh, and made this face.
What does that mean?
That means he went in the back room with some industrialist welfare recipients, oil lobby types or jet fighter makers and got the payoff.
That's what she thought that meant.
But nope, it wasn't that at all.
It was regular Americans who said, hey, wow, this guy really does care about the Constitution and the future of liberty and such.
Huh.
One out of 535 of our representatives in the Congress of the United States who is actually completely different than all the rest of them.
Interesting.
Some lefties are trying to smear him.
I guess we'll get to that in a second hour.
But Glenn Greenwald handled it.
And my thanks to Glenn Greenwald.
This guy Dave Neuert, in fact, we won't get to this in a second hour.
This is all I got to say about this.
This guy Dave Neuert basically claimed all these terrible things about Ron Paul and Glenn Greenwald set him straight.
And Glenn Greenwald is a left-leaning, civil libertarian type and is not a Ron Paul supporter but says, hey, man, what are you doing?
Why do you want to smear Ron Paul?
You disagree with him, fine, but what's with all this innuendo?
What's with all this shoddy research, Dave Neuert?
Come on, man.
So you can find that at Salon.com.
And anyway, so, yeah, there's some more news.
There's some more Ron Paul stuff to discuss.
But I'm going to play a song for you, and then I'm going to come back and talk with my old friend, Dr. Gordon Prather, and he's going to explain America's relationship with the axis of evil as it pertains to their so-called nuclear weapons.
All right, hang tight.
Come on!
Come on!
Jump from the fire!
So come on!
Jump from the fire!
Jump from the fire!
Jump from the fire!
Jump from the fire!
So come on!
Jump from the fire!
Jump from the fire!
Jump from the fire!
Jump from the fire!
Jump from the fire!
Jump from the fire!
So come on!
Jump from the fire!
So come on!
Jump from the fire!
All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
I'm Chaos Radio 92.7, 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Our guest today is Dr. James Gordon Prather from AntiWar.com.
We feature his articles every weekend.
You can find him at AntiWar.com/Prather, and he's a nuclear physicist.
He's worked in more than half a dozen, almost a dozen, different federal government agencies, it looks like here.
He was the chief scientist of the Army, was a legislative assistant for National Security Affairs to U.S. Senator Henry Bellman from Oklahoma, and has worked at Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories, served a career in the Navy, and knows just about everything there is to know about plutonium and uranium and how to get hydrogen to fuse together and all kinds of crazy things.
So welcome back to the show, Dr. Prather.
Hello.
Can you hear me?
Well, you're kind of weak, but that's okay.
Oh, here, let me, I think I can turn myself up a little bit here.
How's that?
Can you hear me now?
Yeah, that's a lot better.
A little bit better there?
All right.
Yeah.
All right, hope I'm not bleeding over on your line too bad there.
Okay, so yeah, Dr. Prather, let's talk about, well, nukes, and let's talk about America's relationship with the Axis of Evil.
And I want to play you a short clip, a shortened version of the clip, of John Bolton, the former American ambassador to the United Nations, who lately has been on an editorial warpath against the appeasers in the administration, as he seems to think they are anyway.
So listen to this short clip here.
It's just a 20-second song.
Mohammed ElBaradei is an apologist for Iran.
He has taken positions in flat violation of three Security Council resolutions, and he needs to learn that he works for the member governments of his agency, not the other way around.
The notion that Israel or the United States would put their national security in the IAEA's hands is just delusional.
All right, so that's John Bolton there to Wolf Blitzer on CNN, saying that Mohammed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, basically is a lackey of the Iranians.
I guess the implication he's lying on behalf of the Iranians to protect a nuclear weapons program of some kind, at least is the innuendo there.
What do you make of that, Dr. Prather?
Well, I think that Bolton is, every time that he's come up against ElBaradei, which is from the beginning of when he first was undersecretary of state for nonproliferation and arms control, and he's done that quite a lot, he's lost.
So now he's out of office, and he's written a book, I guess, which I guess you could call Bonkers Bolton's Greatest Hits, which I'm not going to read, and I don't urge anybody else to read it.
And the thing about that interview with Wolf Blitzer, what I thought was remarkable, is that Wolf didn't roll over, you know, and let Bolton say anything he wanted to say and get away with it.
That's right.
It almost seemed as though Wolf Blitzer knew what the IAEA was for and even some things it had done before.
Yeah, isn't that a change?
Then also, his book wherein he accuses essentially President Bush and most of the administration that's still there of being a bunch of appeasers.
I think that's pretty funny, and I wonder how that's going down with his former mentor, Dick Cheney, and others like that.
I have to tell you, it's pretty amazing to read some of his editorials, I guess, in the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times wrote an article about him, I guess over the weekend, no, it was late last week, talking about how the idea that Condoleezza Rice would talk to the Iranians or the North Koreans at all other than to demand that they heal is basically treason.
So he's providing aid and comfort to the enemy, I guess, in the same sense you and I are, in John Bolton's eyes.
Well, forget about his eyes, I guess.
The other thing that's interesting is that he's in competition with his book sales.
Of course, they'll probably buy up a whole zillion copies and send them out to everybody, but even if they send me one, I ain't going to read it.
But Valerie Plain's book reportedly is now on the New York Times bestseller list, so that's pretty funny.
Yeah, and he did have something to do with that, didn't he?
I think it's not clear.
But let's put it another thing.
I've seen Valerie Plain on four or five interview programs.
Most of these interviews you can find on the Internet somewhere or another on YouTube or something like that.
So even if you don't watch television very much, which I don't, these things are available online and you can download them and listen to them over and over again.
And what's remarkable is the difference in tone between Bolton, who, like I say, it sounds like he's off his medication or something like that, and then here comes Valerie Plain, who wasn't that far up in the hierarchy.
I think she was only a GS-13, maybe a 14.
They have a different system over in the CIA, in the intelligence community, but it's called basically the same sort of thing.
That is, whatever they call it.
For example, I was in the senior executive service and was interviewed, pushed for.
I didn't seek it, but they thought that I would be a good candidate to be the senior intelligence officer for science and technology.
That's the guy who works on one of these national intelligence estimates, except that rather than being for Iran or Iraq or something like that, it's for science and technology worldwide.
Oh, interesting.
It's because they have somebody come in from the outside to do that, to run that.
And so in 1986, I guess it was, Casey was still alive, so I don't remember what year it was, but Casey was the director of CIA and Central Intelligence Agency, and several people who knew Casey fairly well recommended me for that position.
In the end, I didn't get it, and that's the point.
It wasn't offered to me because I was already an SES and an SES-5 slot, you know, goes from one to six, and there are almost no sixes.
And this SES, senior intelligence service slot for the national intelligence officer, was only an SIS-1, so it would have been way down from where I was to go do that.
And they wound up giving it to a Navy captain of all things, a serving Navy captain, which is the equivalent of a GS-16.
Well, Eric, back to that.
Valerie Plame was not all that far up in the world, but some reason or other, they decided, bonkers bolting the rest of them, that they had to get her, and I don't know.
Well, let me ask you this about Valerie Plame.
You have written numerous times about a little-mentioned fact.
I mean, it's been reported, of course, but not very thoroughly.
Was Valerie Plame's role in a CIA front company called Brewster Jennings, and how when Bob Novak outed her in the newspaper, he later went on CNN, I guess later that week, and outed her front company as well, which I guess was already basically, the cover was blown anyway once he gave her name out.
But that this Brewster Jennings and Associates, and I think this has recently been confirmed by some numerous reports, they were in charge of monitoring Iran and Iraq's participation, or lack thereof, in the world's nuclear black markets.
And so when they outed Valerie Plame, it seems like they sort of killed two birds with one stone.
They made Joe Wilson look like a mama's boy, but they also disrupted the CIA's ability to basically have quality intelligence about what the Iranians were or were not up to.
Yeah, Scott, and some woman, is it Sybil Edmonds that you've interviewed?
I can't recall, but there's somebody who claims to have inside information that they weren't after Wilson at all.
They were after Valerie Plame and Brewster Jennings, and that they had gotten in the way.
I have no information one way or the other about this, but it makes more sense to me that they were out to get rid of that network, which was not doing what they wanted.
It was not providing them the rationale for invading Iraq and Iran that they wanted.
That is, the Neocons, the Crazies, the Likudnics, and all the other people who were hell-bent on invading.
And, of course, she was doing her job, and she was the head of that little task force.
As I say, I'm sure she wasn't more than a 14, a GS-14.
I'm sorry, a Navy captain is only a GS-15 equivalent.
Sorry, I got that wrong there.
But in any case, she says that it was driving her nuts because everybody was telling her that all these things existed, and they were so sure that they existed that it makes one wonder if maybe there weren't some plants, you know, some things that were supposed to have been smuggled in through Turkey or someplace like that that were to be found there by the invading forces.
But I don't know, that's conspiracy and all that sort of thing.
But let's get back to Bonkers Bolton and his book.
Yeah, well, it does make sense.
Let me say real quickly, it is speculation, but it does make sense that, from Cheney's point of view, and we've seen the story just in the last week, that he's been suppressing the national intelligence estimate on Iran for more than a year now because it has too many dissenting footnotes, basically, or too many dissenting points of view in it.
It would make perfect sense, at least, that he would want to destroy the CIA's effort to monitor Iran's nuclear black market.
It makes it that much easier to lie.
Yeah, we know, boy, all the way back to 1992, that Cheney, then with Secretary of Defense, had developed this extremely, I don't know what your word is, he felt that the CIA was not working for us, because they had failed to find out a whole bunch of stuff about what Saddam Hussein had been doing in the late 80s and the early 90s.
It was the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, El Veradize Agency.
Of course, at that time, let's see, then it was still Hans Blix, who was Director General then.
But at any rate, it was they who found all of these things that should have been reported to the IAEA, but was not.
Now, the difference between what Saddam Hussein was doing and what Iran is now accused by Bolton and everybody else of doing is that the things that, so far, that have been turned up in Iran that they didn't tell the IAEA about in the late 80s and the 90s, they were under no obligation to tell.
The safeguards agreement that was similar for Iraq and for Iran in those years only requires notification to the International Atomic Energy Agency of all kinds of things, such as buying gas centrifuges to enrich uranium.
You're not required to even tell anybody that you bought those things and that you've installed them and that you've been testing them out with some other kind of gas until six months before you actually put uranium in there.
And then is when you've got to go tell the IAEA.
And now, Dr. Prather, that's such an important point, because we do hear in the talking points of the war party so often that Iran, they had this nuclear program that they kept secret.
Condoleezza Rice actually messed up the talking point in testimony under cross-examination actually by Dr. Ron Paul in the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week, where she said they've been secretly enriching uranium for 18 years, which I think she was mixing up the talking points, but I guess the point she was trying to make was they were making progress on their nuclear program for a long time in secret and getting away with it in terms of staying under the radar of Western intelligence agencies and so forth.
But what you're saying is that when Iran was developing this nuclear technology in secret, they were not in violation of any of their agreements with the IAEA, the Nonproliferation Treaty, the United Nations, et cetera.
Yeah, that stuff, including buying things on the so-called black market from AQ Khan, the so-called Pakistani father of their nuclear weapons.
And I don't want to be an apologist for Iran, but you can certainly understand why they didn't tell anybody they were buying these things, because every time that they had a contract for somebody to supply them with something, the United States would put pressure on whoever it was, and the contract would get canceled.
And these were some very important contracts, contractual legally binding agreements.
One in particular was they had several billion dollars, and I can't recall the percentage.
Maybe you do.
The percentage interest they had in Eurodiff, that was a French-based uranium enrichment consortium.
I don't know.
Go ahead.
It was either one or ten.
I can't recall at the moment.
I think it was ten, but it was a multi-billion dollar investment, which they've never got back.
They have never gotten any thanks to the United States.
They never got their money back.
They haven't gotten any enriched uranium from Eurodiff.
Okay, then under Clinton, the Russians had agreed to supply them a turnkey uranium enrichment gas centrifuge plant, probably better and more advanced, certainly a later generation of gas centrifuges, the ones that they developed on their own in secret.
They bought the secondhand stuff from AQ Con, the so-called black market.
But, you know, it wasn't black market.
It was completely in the open.
It's just that they didn't tell people who they were selling to, and the people who were buying didn't tell anybody that they were buying it.
Like I say, nothing that I know of that Iran did or that Libya did was a violation of their IAEA safeguards agreement.
Now, they may have had the intent to violate it at some point, but, you know, the intent don't count.
Well, back to Bolton again.
When he came in, the story is that he was one of the guys that rushed down to Florida and was one of the strong armors to make sure that the vote came out the way that Cheney wanted them to come out.
And then the story is that when someone asked him, well, what position should we offer Bolton in the Bush-Cheney administration?
And the quote is, Cheney said, give him anything he wants.
Well, he had to settle for undersecretary of state.
And you know what, Doc, he was quoted in the New York Times late last week as saying, I didn't spend 31 days down there in Florida for this, complaining about rices policy now.
I hadn't heard that.
Yeah, I'll send it to you.
There must be a lot of people that are extremely unhappy these days whenever they hear the name Bonkers Bolton.
Okay, but beginning almost immediately upon being sworn in as undersecretary of state, that's the number three level position.
There's several undersecretaries.
There's only one deputy secretary and only one secretary.
But there are several undersecretaries, and he was one of them.
But his was for nonproliferation and arms control, right?
That's his full title.
I'm pretty sure that's correct.
Yeah, sounds right.
And the Clinton administration had done a lot of things that he didn't like very much.
And in particular with North Korea, there were talks scheduled to begin, which after 50 years, nobody had been willing to talk to anybody.
And so the Clinton administration finally decided that this Kim Jong-il, which is the son, is that his name?
Yeah, Kim Jong-il, yeah.
Oh, Jong-il.
Jong-il was the son and...
Kim Il-sung was the father.
That's right.
Well, back to the...
The Clinton administration negotiated this agreed framework with North Korea where they said, okay, freeze everything in place.
And they said, but we'll freeze in the dark.
And they said, oh, we'll supply you with light water power plants like the ones we've got.
And until we get those plants online, which we think will take five or six years, we'll supply you with fuel oil so you won't freeze in the dark.
Well, we now know, and I've talked to people who were involved in the negotiations, that the father died during these negotiations or about that time.
And so they went ahead, the Clinton administration went ahead, not ever expecting to have to live up to this agreement because they didn't expect the son to survive.
Well, that was 1994, okay?
Well, he survived.
And so at the end of the administration in 2000, the year 2000, they finally decided, well, it looks like we're going to have to make good on these agreements, these binding agreements that we made with North Korea, so we might as well get on with it.
Well, one of the first things that happened then when the Bush-Chaney administration came in is that Bolton and some guy that worked for him decided that North Korea had, they were going to charge, or maybe they really believed that North Korea had not been living up to its end of the agreement, the so-called agreed framework of 1994.
And so they canceled these meetings that were going to occur with the North Koreans.
They told the South Korean president that under no circumstances would they ever negotiate with him.
Then they started spreading these stories about they had intelligence that North Korea had this separate uranium enrichment nuclear weapons program that wouldn't have been a violation of their IAEA safeguards agreement, but it certainly would have been a violation of the spirit of the North-South Korean agreement on nuclear matters.
And it would have been a violation in the spirit of the agreed framework.
If it had been true.
What?
If it had been true.
If it had been true.
But it would not, you know.
Okay.
Well, now, so here we are, and we're, the Bush administration, after getting rid of Bolton and finally concluding that, just like the Clinton administration had earlier, that everything they've done has made the situation worse, and so now it's time to talk with the North Koreans.
And now there's the added thing, which wasn't here back in 1994, but we've got a China there that's a neighbor, they're neighbors to North Korea, and the Russians are neighbors to North Korea.
And back in 1994, those countries had a very different status in the world than they do today.
So we're not driving that train anymore in North Korea.
China and Russia are.
And so, you know, we might as well, as they say, when rape's inevitable, you know, relax and enjoy it.
But that's what's about to happen, and Bonkers Bowl is just fit to be tired about this.
That's why it's calling everybody a traitor and all that sort of thing.
But if you read what news we get through the mainstream media, which is, I don't know, they still think we're running the world, in particular, that we're telling the Chinese and the Russians what to do about North Korea.
I don't know how they conclude that, how they can say that with straight face.
But any case, they're now leaking these reports, even by people in the New York Times who used to pass on all this stuff about their nuclear weapons program, the uranium enrichment nuclear weapons program, and how they violated the greed framework and their safeguards agreement and that sort of thing.
They're beginning to say, well, you know what, it looks like maybe, you know, the North Koreans are taking them to all these places and saying, now what is it you say that we're doing here?
Right, now, this is really the key to the thing.
The inspectors are going around everywhere, how's that?
Well, Condi Rice struck a deal with the North Koreans, I guess, while Cheney was out of town or something.
This is what John Bolton's so angry about, is that Rice has figured out how to get the inspectors back on the ground in North Korea, and they're walking around and saying, all right, where's this uranium enrichment program we've been hearing so much about, reading David Sanger in the New York Times, and it's just not there.
Yeah, and what about all these aluminum tubes, you know?
We heard that story before.
Oh, man.
Again, I'm not going to be in the business of defending the North Koreans or the Iranians or the Iraqis or the Pakistanis or anybody like that.
My constant theme is that these guys, when they came into office, and a lot of them were influential even during the Clinton administration, but once they got their hands on power, one of the things that they set out to do was to destroy the nonproliferation treaty, hyphen international atomic energy agency, hyphen nuclear suppliers group, proliferation prevention regime, because it was in their way.
All the countries that they wanted to invade or somehow or another topple the regimes of had in place those agreements, those nonproliferation treaty, IAEA, nuclear supplies group agreements, and the inspectors were reporting that they were in compliance with these agreements.
And they said, well, that'll never, you know, we've got to do something about that.
Right.
So they set out, in my opinion, my opinion.
But I think the evidence is incontrovertible, is that the word?
That's the word.
Yeah, that.
They deliberately decided, okay, the thing that will appeal to soccer moms and security moms and other kinds of moms in this country, the United States, is to scare them with the fear of a mushroom-shaped cloud.
And so in order to make these stories up about all the imminence of a nuclear threat against the United States, we've got to get rid of this whole regime.
Well, and it's so important to note that when all this started, North Korea, Iraq, and Iran, all three charter members of the Axis of Evil, were all members, as you're saying.
And the North Koreans are now, again, the Iraqis.
In the run-up to the Iraq War, and this is something that Wolf Blitzer brought up in his interview with John Bolton, was, hey, you say that this guy ElBaradei is, you know, working for the Iranians somehow, or, you know, is helping them cover up something.
But he got it right about the Iraq War.
And I would say, Gordon, that most people probably have no idea that Mohammad ElBaradei, in February of 2003, before the war against Iraq started, said, look, we've been everywhere.
There's no nuclear program of any kind, much less a nuclear weapons program.
And he got it right then.
But we're supposed to consider him a traitor now for basically saying there's no nuclear weapons program in Iran.
Yeah, he more than said it, he made testimony, which was televised, which you can find some places, for the Security Council every month.
And I think in the month of February, he made more than one such presentation.
And of course, but he's a bureaucrat, like everybody else, he didn't say, well, I can't tell you what, you know.
All I can tell you is we haven't found anything, and we've been everywhere, that everybody has suggested we ought to go, and we can't find anything.
You know.
That's how more and, of course, at the time the administration was trying to get Saddam Hussein to prove a negative, namely, prove to us that you're not doing this or that or any of those other things.
But even Valerie Plame, in her talks about how she was frustrated in their inability to find anything in Iraq before the war, March of 2003, she makes, I can only assume it's an error.
Maybe she doesn't know.
She says the UN inspectors weren't in there for several years in Iraq between the time he quote-unquote threw them out, which, of course, he didn't do.
This would have been under Clinton, by the way.
Right.
Clinton withdrew them before launching Operation Desert Fox on the day that the House was to begin debating articles of impeachment against him in 1998.
Yeah, well, of course, he didn't have the authority to withdraw them.
But he told them, look, I'm about to bomb the gee whiz out of Baghdad, and if you don't want to get killed, maybe you better get out of there.
Yeah, that's an invitation, I don't know.
But in the aftermath of the Gulf War, the first one, the IAEA went in to look at the safeguarded facilities that were there, had been there at any rate in Iraq, and discovered this program.
And they actually had violated their IAEA agreement, Saddam had, because he had actually introduced uranium into their 1940s-type uranium enrichment complex, which they hadn't told anybody about.
And they should have, under their agreement, they should have told the IAEA six months before, which would have been about 1990, okay, that they were going to do that.
Well, the things never worked worth a flip, and when the war started, the first Gulf War, that entire apparatus was down, and they were trying to figure out how they could make it work so that they could get more than gram quantities.
You need kilograms, 10 or 20, 30 kilograms for a nuclear weapon.
And they were just making gram quantities, and it wasn't anything like weapons-grade-enriched uranium.
But any case, those things, all those facilities which were down for modification essentially all got destroyed in the war or in the immediate aftermath, okay.
So when the IAEA discovered that, the IAEA team that came in to look at safeguards, then the Security Council established a special group called the IAEA Action Team on Iraq.
And these are the people that went in and used all these onerous inspection, exhaustive techniques to make sure that there wasn't anything in the country anywhere that they had missed.
And by 1997, thanks in part to the defection of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, they were able to tell the UN Security Council, okay, we now have a coherent picture of everything that the Iraqis did in secret and what's happened to it all, and we're now in a position to say that it's all either been destroyed or we've removed the material or the facilities from the country, and so it isn't there anymore.
So this is in 97, okay.
In 98, as you said, Bill Clinton decided to take the heat off of Monica Lewinska and himself, and so he launched these cruise missiles at Baghdad, and Secretary of State Albright went in and said, we don't care if there aren't any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, we are not going to allow, don't Security Council this, we are not going to allow the sanctions to be removed from Iraq so long as Saddam Hussein is in power.
That's right.
Flat out, you know, we don't care that there aren't any weapons of mass destruction of any kind.
Okay, so they came out in Christmas of 98, the inspectors got out of town to keep them getting killed, and then the chemical and biological types under Hans Blix, well, they went under Hans Blix then, I've forgotten his name now, he was a Swede, I think.
But any rate, they were never allowed, when they applied for visas to come back into Iraq, they weren't allowed to have them.
Okay.
But the IAEA safeguards team, separate outfit from the IAEA action team on Iraq, who were going everywhere and doing everything, but the team that was supposed to go in and verify the safeguards facility, things that were safeguarded, they continued to, you know, apply for a visa, and they said, we want to come in and expect your stuff.
And Saddam Hussein says, come ahead, you know, and they would go in and they would go in and see what was left of, you know, the rubble and all that sort of thing.
And so each year, they were able to verify that as far as they could tell, not only had nobody attempted to reconstruct anything, but the situation was just going downhill because there was no maintenance or anything else of anything around.
Okay, so it's not true that there weren't any UNs and inspectors in Iraq until November of 2002.
There were, and they made regular reports, and you can find them, they're on the website.
And, you know, and the way people get around this is they say the weapons of mass destruction inspectors weren't in there.
Well, that's true, the ones that were, had their mandate in the Security Council resolutions immediately following the war.
But the IAEA itself was still continuing to go in, as they do now, all the time, in Iran.
Yeah, and of course, the all kinds of weapons inspectors were allowed back into Iraq in the run up to the war in 2002 and 2003.
Well, it was a different bunch.
Okay, but no, let's go to Iran now, because time is somewhat limited here.
Now, when it comes to Iran, I guess the first thing I want to ask you is about the quality of AQ Khan's equipment.
Well, first of all, is it right that the Iranians' centrifuges are all stuff that they got from AQ Khan, the Pakistani nuclear arms dealer, and then if that is the case, or to the degree that's the case, what kind of quality of centrifuges are we talking about?
I keep reading Ahmadinejad saying, yes, we have all these centrifuges working, and then I read something else the next day that says, well, actually, they only have a few hundred because the rest of them aren't working right, and they're having a lot of technical problems.
And I remember before you mentioned that some of this stuff is what he called P1 first generation equipment.
I just wonder if you can elaborate on that kind of thing.
Well, all I can say is that I wouldn't trust Ahmadinejad to be a truth teller, although I have yet to see any of his pronouncements that he makes in speeches before the United Nations, things like that, that have factual errors in them.
Whereas almost everything Bolton says has got a factual error, and it's deliberate, and the same thing is true with Condi Rice.
I mean, they just go in there and they deliberately say things that aren't true or they mislead you.
But as in the case with Bolton and with Rice, the thing to do is to read the IAEA reports.
It doesn't matter what Ahmadinejad's name is, what he says, what matters is what the IAEA inspectors, who are the experts.
They are the experts.
Well, if anything, it seems like he's exaggerating how good they're doing.
True, and just for an example, Al Baradai, the Director General, has been mostly concerned all this time, the last several years, about these one or two units of the so-called P2 centrifuges.
P stands for Pakistan, I think.
But just a very brief history is that A.Q.
Khan, the so-called father of the Pakistani bomb, which he was not, and Musharraf and other people have tried to make that clear over and over and over again, he is an expert on uranium enrichment with gas centrifuges.
That's it, okay?
He's not a bomb builder.
He's not a nuclear physicist.
He's a metallurgist.
And what he did was he was working in the Netherlands for subcontractors to Urenco in the, what, 80s?
Yeah, the early 80s.
Urenco is the European centrifuge company.
That's right, and they are now on their eighth generation gas centrifuges, the ones that they're using now and the new plants that they built to enrich uranium for sale, for profit, and all safeguarded, of course.
They're on their eighth generation.
Well, what A.Q.
Khan took from the subcontractor to Urenco were a bunch of drawings and blueprints and things like that, but more than anything else, he took with him the subcontractor list, suppliers, to Urenco.
So then he went back to his country, Pakistan, because by then India had tested a nuclear device, which resulted in the establishment of the regime that we now call the IAEA, Non-Proliferation Treaty Nuclear Suppliers Group, regime.
Well, at any rate, at that time he had what was the first-generation design, and they had a hell of a time by all reports getting those things to work, because they were subsonic, and when they tried to speed them up, they had aluminum rotors in them, aluminum rotors would shatter.
And I read reports that said that out in the back of their labs, you know, there was this great big stack, a mountain of these shattered aluminum tubes, okay.
That device, that first-generation device, which the Pakistanis made some improvements in, is what the Iranians are now trying to make work, and the Pakistanis had a hell of a time getting them to work.
Okay, what Pakistan did is they went ahead to a second-generation job, which is now called P2 in Pakistan, and that uses a special kind of high-tensile-strength steel for rotors, and so they can get them up to supersonic speed.
And they apparently supplied the Iranians with a few, some blueprints and some drawings and maybe even some components for a P2 machine back in the 90s.
And that is the thing that is concerned Elbaradei, what happened to those machines, the P2 machines, which might have been, you know, acceptable in terms of a modern system.
At least it would have been as good, probably, as the Pakistani system.
So what you're saying is...
It wouldn't be anything like as good as the Erenko system, but, you know, which is way up there on the eighth generation of the machines.
Sure.
But wait, wait, wait.
So what you're saying is that what they have, for example, at Natanz, their safeguarded facility at Natanz, that's all first-generation stuff.
And I guess what you're saying is some of the so-called unresolved questions that Mohamed Elbaradei, issues that he still has with the Iranians revolve around the question of what happened to the P2 equipment that they got from Pakistan?
Yeah.
And that's one of the so-called remaining questions that they're still interested in.
See, these guys are experts, and they know what these Iranians are building and spending, you know, if they have got 3,000 of them.
They've got 3,000 first-generation subsonic aluminum rotor gas centrifuge machines that the rotors keep shattering on, you know?
So are the Warhawks, never mind, you know, what they want to do about it, but are they right to be concerned that, you know, there's a secret facility that the IAEA doesn't know about where somewhere these P2 centrifuges are being perfected and maybe uranium is being enriched to a much higher grade?
Well, I wouldn't think so if they're so proud of the first-generation machines that managed to get them to run for a few minutes or an hour or, you know, I don't think they've gotten them to run continuously for any large period of time.
Well, and here's the conflict, right, is that Mohamed Elbaradei is saying, okay, yeah, there's some questions that still are yet to be resolved.
Apparently he has a new deal with them where they promise to answer every outstanding issue by the end of the year.
But he's telling the UN, he's telling the CNN audience that, look, we have no evidence, better, we have no indication that any of Iran's nuclear program has been diverted to a military purpose.
And yet, Dr. Prather, I just played you this clip of John Bolton, and in that interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN, he says that Iran is in violation of three separate UN Security Council resolutions.
So how can it be that the Iranians are in violation of all these UN resolutions while at the same time Mohamed Elbaradei is saying, ah, there's nothing to worry about?
Well, I think he actually said that Elbaradei was in violation, was defying three security council resolutions.
Oh, even better.
Well, so what's behind that?
Well, and he says that, you know, Elbaradei is supposed to be working for us.
Well, he's right in a way.
Elbaradei is supposed to be working for the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
And by an over, there's 140-something, I think there's 170 members in that General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
And by an overwhelming majority, you know, they support Elbaradei, and they are supportive of Iran's inalienable right or the nonproliferation treaty to the peaceful use of nuclear energy.
It's just Bolton, you know.
It's a result of Bolton and other people who've been in power now for, what now, six years, almost seven, and then they had a great deal of influence even during the Clinton administrations.
We're practically alone in the world on so many different issues, it just, you know, it makes you sick.
But one of them is, in our attitude towards Iran's peaceful use of nuclear energy, and in an effort to try to force regime change in Iran, which is what they want, they have not only essentially destroyed the nonproliferation regime, IAEA, nuclear spires group, nonproliferation treaty, but they've also gone and corrupted the IAEA Board of Governors and got them to pass resolutions and refer them to the Security Council over matters that they have absolutely no authority over.
So what you're saying is, Elbaradei is being faithful to the law, the Security Council is outside of their jurisdiction, and then so Bolton is accusing Elbaradei of not coming with the Security Council outside of his jurisdiction.
Yeah, well, I'll go further.
First of all, he corrupts the IAEA Board of Governors.
And so they roll over for him, and they make these reports on up to, they have Elbaradei make these reports on up to the UN Security Council.
Then he puts the strong arm on the UN Security Council, and for some reason or other, neither Russia or China veto it, and that's all they'd have to do is not agree to those resolutions that they did agree to, and that'd be the end of it.
If you're a veto-wielding member of the UN Security Council, as Russia and China are, you don't have to vote against something.
You just have to not vote for it, and that's tantamount to killing it.
Okay, but for some reason or other, they voted for these, or they allowed these resolutions to pass, or at least they didn't point out to anybody that they didn't pass legally.
But if you read those resolutions, they call on Iran to suspend uranium enrichment.
And then they put the sanctions on all the other members of the UN.
The sanctions are not really, most of them are not on the Iranians.
They're on people that would do business with the Iranians if they had a chance.
Same thing's true with North Korea.
The resolutions that were passed there, by and large, were directed at people doing business with North Korea.
So, you know, I don't know why the Russians and the Chinese have agreed or allowed this to happen, other than they want us to continue shooting ourselves in the foot and being more isolated in the world than we were ten years ago.
Yeah, didn't Lenin say something about how they can sell us all the rope to hang us with, or something like that?
No, I don't recall what he said, but it was the nature of, we'll hang them and they'll sell us the rope.
Yeah, yeah.
Alright, well, that sure looks like what's going on here.
I appreciate your insight.
I have to tell you, Doc, all this stuff just comes easy to you, like it's no big deal, the nuclear technology, but especially the treaties, what the hell is an additional protocol to a safeguards agreement and all these things, and you bring clarity to confusion, and I really appreciate it, sir.
Well, and you're welcome, Scott, and of course, as I say, the thing that's tragic about it is it's deliberate.
They know they're, you know, I'm talking about our leaders, secretaries of state, undersecretaries of state, ambassadors.
They know they're lying, and here's the tragic part.
The rest of the world knows they're lying, too.
It's not, you know, it's bad enough that they're doing all this lying, but gee.
It's too bad we're the only ones, the American population, we're the only ones who buy it.
Everybody else knows better.
Well, you know, the IAEA is our agency.
We founded it, and the nuclear suppliers group is our agency.
We established it, and the nonproliferation treaty is largely our treaty, but that was a few years back, and these people have now managed, they said, this is not in our best interest anymore.
That's their view.
Right, it stands in the way of the wars they want.
It's worked fairly well, and it's the only thing we've got.
All right, well, I appreciate your time today, everybody.
You can read everything Dr. Prather writes at antiwar.com/Prather.
Thanks again, Gordon.
Cheers, Scott.
Bye.
I'm going to teach you how to play the game of warfare.
Just a bit like me.
I say, right, left, right, left.
And if you cause me to put a tear in, well, I'll stomp it on, boy.
Don't worry, you're on top of the tide.
I'll trouble you with my own philosophy.
You'll throw yourself in, don't you say?
Right, left, right, left.
One, two.
Fell in love.
Big eyes, buddy.
I'm going to teach you how to play the game of warfare.
Sadly, it appears to me you've got to be much stronger to give your goodbyes.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 92795.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
And coming up, I want to play for you this interview of Dr. Ron Paul with some newspaper editors, the editorial board of a newspaper in New Hampshire.
I forget the town.
But anyway, it's a really great interview of Dr. Paul.
I went ahead and cut out the abortion part because it makes for terrible radio and everybody already knows how they feel about that and everything else.
And I would say that no matter what your position is on that issue, and I happen to disagree with Dr. Paul.
Actually, I agree with him that the state should decide, but I disagree with him about what the state should decide.
But anyway, the guy's a baby doctor.
Cut him some slack, all right?
If he was pro-abortion, he'd have to perform them and he doesn't want to.
So, okay, so you disagree with him on that one issue that divides the people who care about the Bill of Rights and who are anti-war more than anything else.
Oh, yeah, you want to end the empire?
You want to preserve the Bill of Rights?
What, you disagree with me about abortion?
Oh, well, we can't, you know, let's have a culture war.
I say put all that crap aside and stick to the most important issue because, face it, it's not going to change either way.
Yeah, so the guy's anti-abortion.
If he's president, he's going to have a Democratic Congress.
So he's not going to be able to get them to pass a law to limit the court's jurisdiction over the matter anyway, which is his thing.
But if you want to go and watch the abortion part of this interview, it's on the YouTube.
It's part two of the YouTube of this interview.
You can find it.
It's Ron Paul in New Hampshire with this editorial board.
But anyway, so I'm going to play all the non-abortion parts of this interview for you today on Chaos Radio, and it's really great stuff.
And, you know, I began the show today talking about welfare for rich people.
That's really the name of the game, see, welfare for rich people.
And for the liberals and leftists out there, I would ask you to ask yourself all the stuff that you read and write and hear and see, pro-socialism and against capitalism.
How come nobody ever talks about central banking on the left?
How is it that the liberal left is basically, as an article of faith, you know, come on, I'm not calling names.
I'm just saying you're socialists.
That's what it is to be a leftist, you know, of some description or another in the United States today.
It's socialism.
Capitalism is bad.
The profit motive is the root of all evil.
Private property means, you know, keeping others off your property is the same thing as stealing it from them.
You know, all that stuff.
Capitalism equals evil.
Walmart, wah wah, and all that.
How come you guys don't know anything about central banking?
What about money?
Where does money come from?
How about that for the biggest scam in the world?
You oppose Walmart.
Yeah, oh, Walmart, the root of all evil in the world, you know, getting people things they need at cheap prices.
It's absolutely terrifying.
And yet, no discussion on the left.
No discussion on the left.
I mean, if you're a liberal or a leftist who somehow was taught about central banking, you know that you're the exception.
In fact, I was taught about central banking by leftists, and I know I'm an exception.
The leftist who taught me, well, she was an exception.
Alright, but so, basically, the deal is this.
The biggest welfare program for millionaires and billionaires in America is called the Federal Reserve System.
It is a cartel between the biggest banks in America, well, shit, all the banks in America, and the national government.
They have this partnership together, this quasi-free market system, right, which means what?
Public-private partnership, corporatism, what Benito Mussolini called fascism.
When you combine the private profit motives with the power of the state, where they're not there to protect property from crime anymore, they're now there to protect property from competition, from the market.
And so, if you own an evil company, let's say Wal-Mart, you people hate Wal-Mart so much, if the people of this country decide that they all hate Wal-Mart, and through market pressure want to help Wal-Mart's competitors at their expense, Wal-Mart is always going to be able to go and get massive loans, no matter what, forever and ever and ever.
From banks who have the privilege of creating the money out of nothing, that they get that privilege from the Federal Reserve Bank.
George Bush wants to slaughter foreigners without end.
He doesn't come and take it out of your paycheck, not anymore.
He'll in fact even tell you he's cutting taxes and sending you a couple hundred bucks in the mailbox.
But what he's really doing is going down to the Federal Reserve and having them create the money out of nothing.
Well, they create the bonds out of nothing, and then they sell the bonds, and then they buy up bonds, and when they buy up bonds, they buy up the bonds with brand new money.
So that's the bookkeeping trick.
But anyway, they're printing money, they're counterfeiting money, and it's stealing from you.
And the money goes to the people who are already rich.
You may have seen Jon Stewart ask Alan Greenspan, Hey, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke lowers the rate, the stock market goes wild.
But hey, wait a minute.
Isn't the rate, isn't that how much interest some guy's mom is making on her savings account?
And aren't you really screwing the little guy who doesn't play on the stock market on Wall Street, but who has this little savings account, aren't you screwing him for the benefit of these guys who are already rich?
And Greenspan says, hmm, yeah, well, yeah, basically that's how it works.
Well, it is.
And you can thank Dr. Paul for even bringing the issue to Jon Stewart's attention.
I do.
But anyway, I've gone on long enough.
But ask yourself, liberals and left-wingers, how come you don't know anything about central banking?
How come you hate capitalism so much but you don't know the first thing about where money comes from and who controls it and how and why?
You know, and I'm not trying to get all, oh, it's the Rothschilds on you.
I'm just telling you, this is where the corporate bigwigs that you fear so much have police power over the currency that we use.
Never mind over these resources or those or the military industrial complex or the steel or the oil or the whatever.
This is where they have the police power over the actual money itself.
So it seems like the kind of thing that some anti-capitalist liberal leftist might want to learn about, but that might just be me.
Anyway, I'm sorry for going on and on.
Here's Dr. Paul.
He's a nice guy.
He's nothing like me.
Listen to this guy.
He sounds just like a grandpa.
I think he's got 17 grandkids.
And here's another thing about Dr. Ron Paul, too, that makes him very unlike myself.
The guy's a medical doctor.
And, you know, Soledad O'Brien, who's one of the flakiest hairdos on all of TV news, says, oh, Dr. Paul, they say you're a flake.
Is he a flake?
Really?
This guy's delivered 4,000 babies, who performs operations, you know, on dying women in the middle of crises and God knows what.
This guy who diagnoses illness and then does his very best to solve it.
This guy is a flake.
Just listen to him talk.
And, you know, in fact, even in the clip that I cut out of this interview, the abortion thing, he gets into an argument with the lady.
And the lady says, no, come on, Dr. Paul.
And she's not even really following up.
She's just trying to get the last word in and saying, no, I don't believe that when you say this or that.
And he's not arguing with her, thinking to himself.
You can tell by looking at him.
He's not thinking to himself, oh, this is going to be on YouTube later and I need to, you know, make a strong campaign statement like I'm Mitt Romney or something.
He's saying, wow, here's a woman who's intelligent and engaged in a discussion with me and she doesn't quite see it my way yet.
Let me see if I can teach her and persuade her.
And it's great.
And he sounds just like a doctor and the furthest thing from a flake.
And, you know, people want to disagree with Ron Paul.
They want they want to pretend that, you know, taking away the government's power to create unlimited amounts of money for killing people with is a crazy idea.
This, that fine.
But to try to attack Ron Paul's character and say that he's a flake and he's a kook and he's this and that.
When here's a guy who's had nothing but a consistent voting record and speaking record for 30 years, who's a devotee of Ludwig von Mises, who's a self-trained economist.
You know, he could have his own Ph.D. in economics of all self-taught knowledge, you know.
Here's a guy who believes in the Declaration of Independence as much or more than any other American of all out of all 300 million of us.
And who really believes in it and is purely consistent and delivered 4000 babies in his career.
So to try and has been married to the same woman for 50 years.
And says he believes in Jesus, but only when people ask him and doesn't beat anybody over the head with it at all.
You know, to try to attack this guy's character and say that somehow he's a flake or a wingnut or whatever is just crazy.
The fact that wingnuts like me, you know, find him to be such a heroic guy notwithstanding.
The only reason that that's true is because the people like me who pay too close attention to what's going on in this country, we all already knew about Ron Paul.
We've all loved Ron Paul for a long, long time.
And the reason all these new people all love Ron Paul now is because now they've heard of him.
Now they actually hear what he has to say.
And it turns out that Ron Paul's audience is not just kooks, it's everyday people all over the country.
The kooks are the ones who are paying attention when no one else was.
And so we already knew about him.
Everybody, you know, from the punk rockers to the Rolling Thunder motorcycle veterans group and everybody in between.
Gold bugs and anarchists and anti-war pro-Constitution Democrats and a sizable number of conservative Republicans.
He's not like any of us goofballs out here.
He's much more like the regular folks who, now that he's famous, are getting turned on to his message.
OK, now the message.
Good morning.
I'm Nick Pappas, editorial page editor at The Telegraph.
And I'd like to welcome you to the studios of Nashua High School South.
For the next 60 minutes, The Telegraph editorial board is going to talk policy and politics with Ron Paul, the Republican congressman from Texas and a candidate for president of the United States.
Congressman, welcome to Nashua.
Thank you for joining us.
Our senior political reporter, Kevin Landrigan, will ask the first question.
I want to start with this fundraising bonanza you've had in the last week.
Do you think a lot of it is driven by people who support your position on the war?
Is it due to your views on the Constitution, all of the above?
What do you think is out there that's generating this kind of support?
I think the attention getter is the war because it's a big issue.
But I think that prompts a lot of people to go and look at our website and say, I agree with these other issues too and these other positions.
And then they see how I work that into the financial conditions of the country and I talk about the Constitution and they bring it all together and they end up telling me, boy, that makes a lot of sense.
And then they come on board.
But this last fundraiser was pretty astounding.
I think it surprised everybody.
To me the amazing thing was that there were 20,000 new people who sent money in.
So I have over the years always done my fundraising by direct mail.
I've never been able to call people up and just say, hey, send me some money, and I don't deal with a special interest.
So I've dealt with direct mail.
Can you imagine how many direct mail pieces you'd have to mail to get 20,000 new names?
Very, very expensive, hundreds of thousands of new mail, and yet these came up free of charge.
We did nothing.
All of a sudden they found us, sent in money, and they were on our list.
It's sort of like on autopilot.
It's pretty amazing.
With regard to Iraq, how quickly can you withdraw all the troops and what role does the U.S. government have either in domestic or foreign aid once we leave given what we created, the situation?
Well, my position is as soon as possible, and that's overly simplified because how soon is as soon as possible.
But I would think within a few months, it's not a few years like the other candidates are saying.
Even the Democrats are saying, well, 2013, four more years.
That means in perpetuity.
So I would say months, maybe four to six months, depending on what the military says.
But I think the announcement, and if they believed us, would change the nature of everything in that region.
And as far as the moral obligation goes, I think it's an immoral obligation to think that we should be the policemen of the world.
So we act on an immoral principle to go and impose our will on others by invading them and telling them they are going to live like we do.
So I absolutely oppose that.
The more difficult question is, well, we've blown their country up.
There's depleted uranium over there.
We've blown up their bridges, and what are you going to do about it?
And that is not as easy.
I wish I could put the penalty on those who led us to the war.
We could put all the blame on those who gave the advice and who supported it, including many outside of government.
They are the ones who are morally responsible, but that's not possible either.
And I have not been able to accept the idea that the penalty should be further placed on the American taxpayer because there's two reasons.
One, they weren't guilty of anything, the innocent taxpayer.
And the other reason is that when you give money to rebuild an area and you're not there, that money, just like so much of our money already, what are they missing?
$9 billion of cash?
They don't know where it went?
Are they just sending more money over there?
I would say no.
So I'm not willing to tax the American taxpayer more money, and fortunately the country there has an answer, and that is they're a rich country, they have oil, and I would have to say that that's the way it ought to be paid for.
I've argued the case, and it goes over quite well with my crowds, is that the American people are taxed to blow up a country, blow up the bridges, blow up their infrastructure, then they're taxed to rebuild it, which we're in the process of trying to do right now.
At the same time, we're going broke, we have these huge deficits, and we can't even take care of our own bridges.
We can't even take care of our own levees.
So I would say, yes, we have to give up the whole principle of blowing things up around the world as well as rebuilding.
And the sooner we do that, the sooner we can get back to some fiscal sanity.
Congressman Dave Solomon, the editor of The Telegraph.
Part of your popularity has to do with your extreme reduction in the size of government that you've proposed, including wholesale elimination of many agencies like the Department of Energy, Department of Education, FEMA, even the IRS.
Do you think, if elected, that the people who vote for you should realistically believe these things can be accomplished because you would still need Congress and the Supreme Court?
They realistically could believe that that's what I would try to do, but realistically, the president doesn't have that authority, and I'm trying to reduce the size and scope and the authority of the executive branch.
That's one of our greatest threats.
So I couldn't do that, but if an individual like myself is elected, it sends a very powerful political message, and that, I have noticed, is already influencing a lot of people in Congress because people I've never talked to before are coming up and they're impressed.
Where's your support coming from?
Where's this money coming from?
And their antennas go up, so it's a shift of political thinking.
So I think that there's a limit to what you can do, but you have to be able to lead.
I think the area that you have the most responsibility and the most ability to do would be in the foreign policy.
But if you look at the campaign, at the top of the list, I mean, they know that I would aim for getting rid of some of these departments, but that wasn't the reason I filed.
I mean, it was over the war issue and the financial condition of the country and personal liberties.
It wasn't to get rid of the Department of Education.
As a matter of fact, I make the case for saying that some of the individuals and groups that are totally dependent, that we've taught to be dependent, I think I'm the only one that has any commonsensical answer to it because I want to cut so much money from overseas, cut the deficit, and then the necessary programs that maybe we'll work on later.
See, I argue I'm not going to put anybody out in the streets.
If they're dependent on Medicaid and Medicare or education, that shouldn't be where we attack it.
So I sort of resent the idea that finally we get a veto.
It's on child health care from somebody that I don't think is a true conservative.
At the same time, there's no effort to cut the big earmarks for the military industrial complex and these hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars.
Just think of how far that $10 billion could have gone that we have just pumped in the last six years into Pakistan.
To support a military dictator, it's now the whole thing is coming unglued, and that's the reason that the militants have an incentive to rally against our public government as well as against us.
So the whole nature of things would change if we could devise a system where we could cut and actually see some of these people tied it over.
So in spite of the fact that philosophically I don't endorse the programs, they shouldn't have ever been started, and it's part of the problem, but it's not part of the early answer.
I'm Stacy Millbower.
I'm a community columnist.
I'm sort of asking this on behalf of our other community colleagues, Eduardo, who's not here.
I know that you say that the United States needs secure borders.
How do you plan to do that?
I do not think the answer in securing borders is just putting up big fences, so that is not my answer.
I do believe that we need more border guards.
We've sent some of our border guards to Iraq, and that doesn't make any sense to me, so we should do our very best to monitor the people coming in because we live in a difficult age and terrorists can come in, and we should do our very best.
Since I don't believe in the military barrier, what do we do to curtail illegal immigration?
It's not so much that we want to militarize and build fences as much as we want to make sure our immigration is legal and controlled.
I think we have illegal immigration because of the incentives.
We reward people who break the law.
They get moved up in front of the line.
We've given them amnesty before.
Amnesty, unfortunately, looks like it will come again, so if you want to come into this country and you want to get in front of the line, do it and bring your family.
They're promised free medical care and free education.
These burdens have been put on the states.
I don't like that.
I don't think there should be any subsidies.
Our hospitals are closing in Texas and in California because they can't afford to pass out this free care.
So I think our welfare incentive system, which is mandated and dictated by the federal government, has compounded this problem with the promise of amnesty.
So it's not easily done.
You don't solve that unless you change attitudes about the welfare system.
But in the meantime, what you want to do is put more resources on the border.
Don't worry so much about the border between Syria and Iraq and these foreign borders, and we should be more concerned about our own borders.
Thank you.
Your proposed legislative approach, which would remove the jurisdiction of the courts, aren't you concerned that any legislative remedy could ultimately be overturned by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional itself?
I guess that's the case, but the Congress is supposed to act wisely, remove the jurisdiction on only the things that are popularly supported.
If they started removing...
As a matter of fact, I think in one of these anti-privacy bills, the bill said that the Supreme Court couldn't rule on that.
And they were using it in the opposite way.
What you're suggesting, I can't remember, was the Patriot Act or the FISA courts or something that was a violation of civil liberties by the federal government.
And then saying that you...
I guess it was these secret prisons and habeas corpus.
You don't have the right to go to the federal court?
Yeah, that is a danger, and that's why you have to do it with some common sense.
But for us to write that into the law and say that...
And I'd have to argue they had the authority to do that, but boy, that is horrendous abuse.
That's really violating the whole concept of the government protecting our privacy and our rights.
With regard to stem cell research, is it accurate to say your position is that you could support expansion of stem cell research, but not federal funding, is that right?
That's right.
In a debate that was asked me, and I said that in Washington you only have two choices.
You either have the opportunity to ban it or subsidize it.
Well, why not look to the Constitution and the freedom?
Just legalize these ideas and allow people to do it and do research.
That's a difficult...
Sometimes it becomes more difficult exactly when and where, but under the Constitution the states actually could fund it and they could permit it.
But I have a personal belief from my medical background that stem cell research is very, very important.
And you don't see any inconsistency with that position and your sort of absolutist position on abortion, given that these are embryos?
Yeah, but you said stem cell research.
You didn't say specifically, you didn't describe embryos being cultured in dishes.
In order to do it, there's a lot of stem cell type research from umbilical blood.
And I see even embryologically, I've had to operate on women who have had a tubal pregnancy in a small embryo which is alive and very normal, and it's really eye-opening to see.
You look at it on the ultrasound and you see a little fetus there with a heart beating.
And yet there's an absolute rule on that if you don't deal with it.
We know the fetus can't live, and we know the mother may well die.
And so we take them out.
I cannot see any reason why under those circumstances to say, oh well, you know, it is nature, it's God's will that this has happened, therefore we should say that we can't use it.
So I would be open, because there's difficulty in figuring this all out, that's why I don't want the federal government either subsidizing it, because subsidizing it means you're taking money from people and you find it abhorrent.
At the same time, if you prevent it, you prevent things from coming up and solutions that should be worked out at a local level.
And actually ethical conduct would sure help us a lot in the way this happens.
As a matter of fact, ethical conduct would help solve the problem of the third trimester abortions too, you know, that there's a limit.
What should the U.S. policy be to try and prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon?
Or should it matter to us?
Well, it should matter, and one thing is we reward people who get nuclear weapons, you know, and we should never reward them.
I mean, India and Pakistan got nuclear weapons and they didn't follow the nonproliferation treaty, but we give them both money.
Here's a rogue nation in a way, a military dictator through an elected government, and we went and gave them $10 billion in six years.
So what are we doing with Korea?
I mean, they're not a nuclear power, but they explode a little bomb, so we rush over there and offer them nuclear technology.
Oh, if you do it under our supervision, we're going to give you money.
And so we subsidize people.
We subsidize them or we bomb them.
You know, it's sort of like the issue of stem cell research.
Why don't we have another option?
Why do we have to either threaten them with bombs or reward them with taxpayers' money?
We shouldn't offer these rewards.
At the same time, we shouldn't get hysterical over the fact that they might in 10 years from now have a nuclear weapon.
I mean, the Soviets had 40,000 of them, and I was in the military during that time.
I was drafted in 1962, and during the Cuban crisis, how could anything be more tense?
I mean, we didn't have to fight a nuclear war.
Actually, we did what we were supposed to do.
Kennedy called up Khrushchev and said, hey, what's the trouble?
Well, you got them on our borders.
So he said, I'll take them out of Turkey.
You take them out of Cuba.
They talked, and they negotiated.
And the Iranians, even if they had five nuclear weapons, what are they going to do with them?
Are they going to shoot one of them toward Israel?
They would be wiped off the map within hours by Israel and by the United States.
So they're not going to do this.
And I think we way overreact.
If we could stand down the Soviets and the Chinese and trade with China, we shouldn't get hysterical and threaten them with a nuclear first strike without talking to them.
I just think the difference would be if we had a president and said, look, we're going to talk to you.
We're going to remove the sanctions.
We're moving our navy out, and we're getting our troops out of Iraq and out of Afghanistan.
All of a sudden, I think oil would drop $20 a barrel if they believed this.
Representative Marty Carlin, I'm the Sunday editor.
Just to follow up on the Iran nuclear question, other candidates make the case that it may not be the government of Iran that would have a nuclear weapon and would try to use it on the United States, but the fact that the technology or even the weapon would be out there that a terrorist organization could get ahold of and use on us.
Mutual nuclear destruction has proven to work with sovereign governments and countries with national interests.
But if it's like an extraterritorial threat, like an Al-Qaeda or something like that, how do you deal with that?
And given your desire to kind of eliminate the military footprint that the United States has around the world, do you see that as what kind of diplomatic or law enforcement efforts would you have in mind to try to guard against that?
Well, like I said, I think they have a greater incentive than to do exactly what you'd like to prevent by our policies.
But if you're worried about rogue nations or groups getting them, you have to be pretty concerned right now.
I mean, Pakistan's been involved in passing out information and dealing with the Koreans, and we were giving them money.
So we were literally subsidizing the spread of nuclear technology.
And so it, to me, doesn't make any sense, you know, to think that we can just badger the Iranians out of doing this.
You have to be concerned about the nuclear weapons left over from the Soviet system.
I imagine that's a much greater danger, and nobody knows exactly where they are.
I think the odds of a renegade 100, 200, 300 Al-Qaeda up in the mountains are likely to be given a nuclear weapon by one of these governments by slim to none.
We can be concerned about it, but the likelihood of that happening is pretty remote, pretty remote.
So we shouldn't design our whole policy around that.
It's sort of like overreacting.
Right now, we're insisting that we put anti-ballistic missiles that may or may not work and have another trillion-dollar military industrial complex project and put missiles on the Russian borders because the Iranians might shoot a missile toward us.
And people buy into that stuff, you know, and it makes no sense at all.
But it will contribute to the bankruptcy of the country, and that's what's coming.
I mean, all empires end.
They're probably not going to end by everybody listening to me, but they will end, and it's coming to an end.
It may be much sooner than anybody realizes because all you have to do is look at the dollar.
Every country in the history of man that overextended itself destroyed their currency.
Even in ancient times, they debased the currency, and that is what we do.
Every single day, we just create new money to pay these bills.
It depended on people loaning us the money.
At the same time, what was the announcement today?
The Chinese said, we might not loan you some money, and we might not be so generous.
Believe me, that is a big issue.
If you want to deal with a big issue, and that's related to foreign policy.
So what kind of trade agreement would you support?
I know you've been critical of NAFTA and other policies, but what in your mind constitutes free trade, and why do these agreements not even come close?
Well, the responsibility of foreign commerce is with the Congress.
So Congress decides all bilateral arrangements, and they should pass laws and say what the tariffs are and design a system, and I would always argue for the system of free trade.
The Congress could unilaterally just write and say no more sanctions on Cuba.
Travel to Cuba.
Do whatever you want.
You don't need NAFTA to another government level to manage the trade.
NAFTA and CAFTA and the WTO just serves a special interest.
There are more times the United States go to WTO to get permission to put on tariffs, and they do that in the name of free trade.
Well, they're not free traders.
They're managed traders, and the other ones who react to it become protectionists, and I'm not a protectionist, but I'm not a managed trade person.
I'm a free trade person.
It would have never dawned on the founders of this country to think that we would have world government managing trade.
So here we now have a WTO that's supposed to manage the trade, and they're eagerly trying to get hold of all vitamins and nutritional substances to control it for the benefit of the drug companies, and there's a big issue.
I have that come up a lot in campaigning, the people who don't want to lose their right to buy nutritional and to participate in alternative medical programs, and yet this is likely going to get turned over to the WTO, so it's going to benefit the drug companies.
The drug companies are worldwide, and they'd like to control all these products.
Congressman, we've talked a little bit about Iraq and Iran.
What about Afghanistan?
Do you feel any differently in terms of what our role should be over there?
Do you see any continued role for the U.S. and Afghanistan under a Ron Paul administration?
No, we should come home from Afghanistan.
The authority which I voted for was to go after al Qaeda.
It was not to occupy and go into nation building and overthrow their government.
It was to go after al Qaeda, the people responsible, and the truth is that the Taliban probably tolerated the al Qaeda, but they weren't the sponsors.
I think they were just tolerant.
But here we are in nation building again.
That's not going well.
There's a big explosion today.
More Americans have been killed.
We're in the nation building, and it falls in the category of a mess.
Involvement in the internal affairs of another nation, nation building, continuing alliances.
We should come home from there too.
Congressman, you mentioned that we should not be the world's policemen.
Do you think should the world police itself?
I mean, should that be the role of the United Nations?
Or what can countries do to, I guess, treat the peace with other countries near their borders or in other situations like in Darfur or places like that?
What should happen?
Well, we should treat other countries like we treat Canada.
I mean, it's getting tougher now to travel back and forth, but there was a time when I lived in Detroit.
I was doing some of my medical training.
I thought it was rather neat.
We could pretty easily just walk over and come back.
Now our government says, I can't even go there without a passport.
So it's getting worse.
So no, I think going back and forth, and I mean, we're not going to fight with Canada.
We're not going to fight with Mexico.
It's bilateral agreements, and the way we treat people, you don't need government to tell us to do that.
And Darfur is the same principle as getting involved for military reasons.
It may be humanitarian reasons, but it sounds like good intentions, and it may well be good intentions, but it doesn't work that way because if you send food over there and put it out there, no matter who you give it to, the strong arms get it.
They use it as weapons.
Whoever is the strongest takes everything we send them.
You give it to the government, you have to pick which side you're going to give it to so you're involved in a civil war.
So we should be humanitarians, and if we are truly prosperous and there's some real suffering over there, individuals as well as the Bill Gateses of the world, we'd have more money, not less.
It would be distributed, and probably more fairly, rather than us getting involved, passing out political tools and just increasing the chances of these wars spreading.
There's not much evidence that any of that's been very successful.
You can't say none of it ever helped, but basically it doesn't work.
We don't have the authority to do it.
It doesn't work well, and we're all so broke.
And it's not like all our aid would dry up.
I mean, the American people are very, very generous, and I think people who really suffer would get help from Americans.
Well, Congressman, what's the limit on your commitment to lack of American intervention in the world?
What would be acceptable?
For instance, was it appropriate to intervene in Kuwait when it was invaded by Iraq?
No.
You would have just let Kuwait fall as an Iraq state.
Yeah, but what might have happened, who wanted them in there?
Not one Arab nation wanted them in there.
Israel didn't want them in there.
The Iranians didn't want them in there.
Maybe the United Arab League might have talked to Israel, and I think they'd have gotten them out of there.
I think they'd have taken out Saddam Hussein and we wouldn't have had this 15 more years of killing and war.
So there are other alternatives, and I think we've done so much damage to Israel because we take away all their sovereign rights to make these determinations.
We subsidize them.
We weaken their economy because they don't have enough incentive to take care of themselves because they become more socialistic.
If they want to deal with their neighbors in a friendly way, we object.
If they want to deal with Assyria and talk to them, they say, oh, no, you can't do this.
Or if they want to be tougher, we restrain them.
When war breaks out of there, don't do it.
This will expand it.
And they sell their sovereignty out to us.
They can't say a word.
If we're not there, Israel have a greater motivation to do what they need to defend themselves and also that have a greater motivation to talk to more moderate nations.
And I don't know why the United Arab League with Israeli's power couldn't have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein quickly and not the way we attempted to do it because we didn't declare war.
We really didn't win the war because we're still fighting that same war.
And let's say it was argued that it's our national security interest to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.
It doesn't mean that I, as the president, has a final answer.
Actually, the people have the final answer in the Congress.
You shouldn't pretend that it's not a war and say, you know, we're going to go in, but it's not a war.
We've got to go in because the U.N. tells us to.
You say to the American people and to the Congress, if you think this war is important, declare the war, fight it and get it over with.
And who's the enemy?
Is it Saddam Hussein?
You don't do half a war.
You don't just push him out and bomb and kill a bunch of civilians and not kill Saddam Hussein, which is, you know, the shortcoming of the policy.
You spoke about devaluing currency.
Do you advocate going to the gold standard?
Can you explain how that would work and what that would mean to the economy?
Well, it means that the government has no right to devalue your currency, which they do constantly, because it's your money, you've earned it.
Just in these last weeks, our dollar has gone down precipitously.
So if you happen to have a CD in the bank, you might have lost 10% of your money.
And it's a deliberate policy.
It's done by the Federal Reserve in a secret fashion.
It's done to serve the special interests.
It's done to serve the interests of big spenders who can't tax anymore and can't borrow anymore, so they just create the money.
Low interest rates means creating new money, debasing the currency.
The founders understood this very clearly.
That's why they said there shall be no emitting of bills of credit and that only gold and silver could be legal tender.
They knew about runaway inflation of the continental dollar and they were arguing against it.
And monetary history shows that paper money never lasts and it ends badly and it's the empire that usually drives the currency down and that's what we're in the midst of.
And if we're perceived as a weak military power and we have a bad recession, it's this perception of military power that we're invincible as well as an economic power that we're invincible.
That sort of gives a value to currency, maybe unearned value, but you can have an unearned value to currency if the perceptions are right.
But right now perceptions are changing because the currency really isn't backed up by anything.
So a gold standard literally restrains government growth and it protects the people who save money and also eliminates the business cycle because the business cycle is created by the Federal Reserve manipulation of the currency.
The Federal Reserve created the NASDAQ bubble and they created the housing bubble, taking interest rates down to 1% and saying that you can get a house for under 4% or under 5% and true market interest rates weren't that low.
So no wonder people over speculate it.
So the debasement of currency is the issue of our times that will be on our plates that we'll have to deal with whether we want to or not because it can't be maintained.
The question is how do you do it?
And my approach to that is that you just legalize a competing currency rather than trying to close down one system overnight.
If you wanted to go to the bank and save in a gold bond instead of a paper bond, you'd be allowed to, but today you can't do it because of our tax codes.
They won't allow you to do it.
Congressman, I usually ask a question from our readers.
This is a question we asked another candidate for other candidates and that was if you had been president during 9-11, what might you have done differently than President Bush did?
Well, I did authorize the authority to go after the individuals we believe did it.
I would have done it differently.
I would have concentrated on that and I wouldn't have gotten into nation building in Afghanistan or in Iraq and I wouldn't have depended on Pakistan and the Northern Alliance to do our job at Tora Bora and we lost and he got away.
I would also have followed up on a bill that I introduced which was called issuing a letter of mark and reprisal which is something that Congress can do and that was used in our early history to go after stateless criminals like the pirates and the best example of how that might have worked would be to see how a Ross Perot dealt with his hostages versus how our government dealt with our hostages in Iran and he was rather successful but the letter comes from Congress and says that private individuals can be authorized and it's your job to go out and get them and I think to me it's different than the mercenary approach of what's happening in Iraq right now where Blackwater and Halliburton, I don't like any of that.
This would be much more specific and they have very strict rules against not breaking the law and it was an international agreement that it was used to do this so I would place a lot more confidence in a Ross Perot approach to going after a band of individuals that orchestrated that against us.
Congressman, during your career you've been an outspoken supporter of civil liberties.
I was wondering if you could maybe expand on that a bit and talk a little bit about your commitment to open government in principle and then maybe specifically reference to your sunlight rule which I believe is legislation that you filed in the Congress.
Yes, I generally make the comments that we turn this whole issue on its head because the government was instituted to protect the people's privacy and yet today the people's privacy is being violated at the same time government secrecy is growing by leaps and bounds which is rather new and I want a much more open system where you can find out exactly what the government is doing and there would be certainly some times, especially in a time of war where military plans would be important but for the most part I don't know very much that shouldn't be known to the people.
Can you imagine what has been done by the CIA secretly over the last 50 years or so?
I mean it is unbelievable if you read all the books that have been written by CIA agents on how they go in right now.
CIA agents trying to undermine the government of Iran.
You know, another regime change.
We get involved in elections and I want that to be fully known.
Of course, I want it to be stopped to tell you the truth.
I mean it was the CIA that was involved with Diem being taken out in Vietnam and it was our CIA that helped put in the Shah which the Iranians still remember and the Iran Contra, CIA type activities.
So I think all that stuff should be either stopped or absolutely open except for the very, very necessary military secrets but this idea that the government can be hiding behind executive privilege and not have to reveal what they are doing I think is very bad.
And the sunlight rule, can you touch base on that?
Well, I probably have to refresh my memory a little bit there but just the sunlight rule is just to make sure that the American people know exactly what's happening.
Okay, I guess maybe that's the wrong term.
I thought you would file legislation that set a, I believe it was a 10-day period before Congress could act on legislation.
Oh, okay, on the legislature.
Oh, yes.
Yes, we have proposed that and I sort of support the idea that the Congressman ought to read the bills and that was the time element and some old-fashioned ideas like that.
And I do that more to make a point because how would you compel them to do it?
And there is always a way to get around it.
You could do that and have the legislation and the principle of the manager's amendment.
This is what happens so often.
And it really makes a point but it's not the answer because you're going to have a piece of legislation.
They did this with the Patriot Act.
All right, folks, it's anti-war radio wrapping up for the day.
You know, I'm going to go ahead and let this audio play and see how long it lasts.
It's the end of my show but continuing with this great Ron Paul interview with this newspaper editorial board in New Hampshire.
And this is interesting.
You know, so often he talks as though everybody already is familiar with what he's talking about but the manager's amendment says that, you know, remember how a bill becomes a law?
Each house votes on the bill and then it goes to the conference committee and then they decide on the final draft.
Then they send it back to the House and the Senate and then they vote on it again on the final version and then they send it on.
Well, they have this manager's amendment that says, oh, well, these managers can go in there and they can change an if to a to or whatever the hell but nothing of real substance.
But they abuse that power and oftentimes rewrite laws after they've been passed for the final time, after they've gone from the House and the Senate to the conference committee, back to the House and the Senate and then are on their way to the president.
These guys are still writing shit in them and they did that with the Patriot Act.
So here's Ron Paul in that and that's all for me today.
Someone will kick me off of here before too long.
But stop by a stress blog, say hi.
I'll be around tomorrow 11 to 1 Texas time.
Thanks.
The House worked on the Patriot Act, which wasn't nearly as bad as the Senate version, and the Senate was working on a version.
Then it came time for us to look at it and the House just threw theirs out the window, which we had been working on and studying and gave us something very close to what the Senate was doing, but they gave it to us an hour or so before it happened.
Hopefully you'd think that could stop it, but you'd have to reverse all the rules of the House of the Manager's Amendment, which was originally intended to make minor corrections.
We're going to change this phrase and clarify this and that sort of thing, but now the Manager's Amendment can come down and change the whole bill.
So these things don't get solved unless you have ethical people in government that will live up to what they're supposed to be doing, but the legislation over this 10 days is to make that point.
That's what we ought to be doing.
Congressman, if you don't win the Republican nomination, would you run again as a Libertarian in the general election?
I have no intention of doing that.
This is not my plan.
What is it, independent?
Not my plan.
Congressman, this is another question I ask a lot of the candidates, and I'm particularly interested, because you're a doctor, how you feel about the medical use of marijuana.
Medical use of marijuana, I'm for it, and for it for medical reasons and for it for political reasons.
People ought to be able to make their own choices and for it for constitutional reasons, and that is there shouldn't be any thou shalt nots by the federal government that somebody can't smoke or drink something.
It didn't make sense.
At least they did it properly with alcohol.
That's a lot more respect for the Constitution.
They amended the Constitution to tell people they can't drink alcohol.
Then they repealed the amendment.
But no, in 1938 they said, oh, marijuana could be bad for you.
That's how recent it's been.
In 1938 they wanted to overtax it so people wouldn't use it.
But the principle is that in a free society, people should be able to make up their own mind what they put in their bodies, whether it's nutritional substances or whether they're smoking medical marijuana.
But the states have a right to regulate it.
But in a state like California or wherever, if they legalize it, they should be legal.
But here the federal government is going in and superseding everything the state has done, arresting these people, people who are in wheelchairs.
You remember that one person, I think he was suffering from muscular dystrophy, and asked one of the candidates, would you arrest me?
And he couldn't even say, no, I wouldn't arrest you and put you in jail.
He said, I don't want you to have that right to do that, which means I'd enforce the law.
And that's compassionate conservatism.
I mean, it's unbelievable.
And the prisons are full.
And we have federal laws that tell people who use these medications never committed a violent crime, and they have mandatory lifetime sentences.
At the same time you see rapists and child molesters getting out on the street.
I mean, where's our common sense?
And these are people who are sick.
And people who have addictions are sick, like alcoholics.
We don't round up alcoholics and put them in prison.
But for an alcoholic to kill somebody on a highway, they should be put in prison.
Same way with drugs, if they do.
So are you also for just legalization of marijuana outside of medical use as well?
Well, that would be my belief, but it's also up to the states to decide.
Just like alcohol, there's a lot of states that prohibit children from buying alcohol, which I would support.
But the thing of it is, kids in...
I mean, we have all these laws against marijuana, and they can get marijuana easier than they can get alcohol, because you get checked for...
If you walk into the 7-Eleven, you are not going to get your alcohol as easy, but you can go down the street.
But there's no incentive for people to be selling alcohol down the street.
They don't bootleg alcohol because it's legal.
So I think we have...
I think the war on drugs is close to an insane policy the way it's being run.
And if you look at the numbers, you're not talking about a few million dollars.
You're talking about probably since early 70s, it might be five or six hundred billion dollars.
And even if you weren't for federal programs, just think if you spent half of it on education, you might have...
Or treatment, treatment would probably be better.
I wouldn't have wanted that, but I mean, it would have been an alternative policy that I would have supported if we say, well, let's not put people in prison.
Let's treat them and save some money.
I'd support that as a transition and move it in the right direction.
Do you think that in legalizing drugs, should the states get involved in regulating and or selling them?
It would be up to the states.
Some states even regulate and sell alcohol.
So I think I see drugs as drugs and they can do it.
So they could.
But I would keep the federal government out of it.
Do you see any role in federal leadership or anything in terms of fostering energy independence in the country and how big an issue do you think that is?
Well, in an indirect fashion.
If they got out of the way, we would move toward energy independence and the market would decide where to put the money.
But when it's an active way instead of passive, you have people taking your money and saying, well, if we support the people out west that grow corn, maybe ethanol is going to solve our problems.
But then it may turn out that growing ethanol is more expensive than the energy we produce.
But yes, we should have alternative sources but it can be best found in the market.
Even related to the marijuana question is, for some weird reason, they came up with this idea that hemp, somebody is going to smoke hemp, but you don't smoke hemp.
So we're not even allowed to raise hemp, even though that was a big product during World War II and helped us fight the war.
And there's a lot of products.
There's nutritional products and commercial products.
There are a lot of them raised in Canada and we're allowed to import the products.
But hemp is supposed to be a pretty good source of ethanol.
So we prohibit ethanol coming from hemp.
We subsidize it going into corn.
We don't give the same subsidies as sugar cane, which could be done, and the Brazilians say sugar cane is better.
I'll tell you one thing, the politicians and the bureaucrats don't know.
Only the market knows these answers on what they can do to solve these, sort this out, and that's why the pricing structure is so important.
If the price is right and they can make money, it's going to work.
And when the price of energy goes up, because if there's a true shortage, not an artificial shortage that we create by fighting wars over there, I mean, we went over there to save our oil and the oil was $28 a barrel when the Iraqi war started, and I'll look at it.
And I think that's part of the reason why it's $100 today is because of the threat going into Iran.
Price, though, would help us decide what to do, whether solar energy is feasible.
Nuclear energy, I think, is really a good way to go, and it's the safest fuel.
It's a lot safer than any hydrocarbons, and we may be driving electric cars if we run out of oil.
You wouldn't want to place any, either offer government incentives or place disincentives on certain energy sources to push the market in one way.
You just want to leave this completely open.
Passive incentives, that is, I would give tax credits to anybody who wants to, you know, invest to get some of their own money back.
Of course, I don't want to take their money in the first place, but if we take it, and somebody who wants to do research in renewable energy, I'd give tax credits, but not subsidies.
We have sometimes energy bills that we pass, and maybe 60 or 70 percent of it will be deregulation and maybe some tax incentives and this sort of thing, which I would support.
But then they throw in billions of dollars to send off to their special cronies.
You know, the people who have an ear of the administration and this becomes a corporate subsidy, so I can't vote for it.
But the indirect, by giving a fair tax credit to everybody, but to give it to corn and not hemp or not sugar cane distorts the market, and I think that hurts us.
Congressman, what role do you think government has to play in ensuring adequate health care to the citizens of the nation, particularly the many millions who have no health insurance and no access to the health care system?
Well, not very much.
Indirectly, if they had a healthy economy and more prosperity and a sound currency, there'd be a lot more money, and it would help us buy everything.
Instead of $10 billion doing the mashar, if it was left here, we may have a lot better jobs here in this country that we could afford, and they could buy their health care.
But we've had managed care for 35 years, and it's a total disaster.
It serves the interests of the management companies, HMOs, the PPOs, the drug companies.
They're the ones who lobby for this system.
So it doesn't work, so they don't want to socialize it, so the bureaucrats run it.
So if you want to help people, you have to believe that freedom really works and it's the way to go.
It existed for most of our history, and when I practiced medicine early, nobody.
Nobody was put out in the street.
Churches ran hospitals.
There was a lot of charity, and prices were much lower.
So we shouldn't be intimidated to think that if government didn't do it, it wouldn't happen.
But the truth is government has no money.
I mean, they can't just say, well, you don't have insurance, we're going to give you money.
Where are they going to get the money?
Especially with the finances that we have today.
But in light of all that, I still argue the case that I wouldn't put anybody out in the street.
The current programs that we have, as a matter of fact, I would take care of them, but by that I'd have to save the money.
You just can't print the money or borrow the money or tax.
It won't work.
So you have to change foreign policy, save that money, and help some of these people.
Since I'm not going to have a perfectly free society in my lifetime, but I know what we should have, and that's the direction we should go, there's no reason why you can't have a position that would go in that direction, but you're actually cutting back somewhere.
Cut enough spending overseas to cut the deficit, help people.
But I'm always offering to young people, and I think that's why they joined the campaign, is if you don't like the system, get out.
You don't need to be in Social Security and take one of these health medical accounts where you can get all your money back from the taxes, set up your own fund, pay your own bills, buy your own major medical.
And if the country is more prosperous, a healthy economy, there's a lot of people who then would end up buying their own insurance.
But you've expressed some support in the past for a tax credit of some kind, haven't you, for individuals?
Yeah.
How would that work?
Well, I have them both for education and medicine and as much as I could get, which means the responsibility falls on the patient or the parents to educate their children, and they get all their money back from the taxes that they pay.
Of course, others would say, well, no, the government won't have enough money then.
If they are getting all their money back, that means you have to cut spending somewhere.
But no, the tax credit is an in-between system, just like we talked about energy, whether it's energy, whether it's medical, whether it's education, allow people a tax break when they assume responsibility for themselves.
Congressman, on that note, I know you're very pro-homeschooling, and how does that fit in in terms of change from what's going on now in terms of what support there is out there?
We can promote homeschooling?
I'm sorry, what?
Promoting homeschooling?
Yeah, how would you promote it in a way that's not being promoted already?
Well, just the bill that we just mentioned of the tax credits, homeschoolers would be able to deduct all their educational expenses.
It wouldn't cost them anything out of pocket because they'd get it back.
And that means, under my bill, homeschoolers would get their money.
If you went to private schools, you'd get your money back off your taxes.
And actually, if you were in public school and you bought extra material or a computer or had a tutor, you could get your money back too.
So it's the parent making the decision.
And that's not the same as vouchers?
No, it's a lot different.
Vouchers under the Constitution would be permissible by the state.
We had one chance to vote for federal vouchers in D.C.
I voted against it.
Not that I'm 100% against vouchers, but if you had vouchers, it shouldn't increase the cost because people are leaving it.
But that was just another added on program and we already spent $13,000 a year for every student in Washington, D.C.
And of course, it's probably the worst system in the country.
So I couldn't support it because it wasn't fiscally responsible.
But the tax credit is much safer to protect individual choice.
Once you give them a voucher, then they say where you can use the voucher and we will inspect your school and we will make sure that you're being taught this.
And so you still have the federal bureaucracy honing down.
It might even enhance the federal bureaucracy because it might need more people to check homeschoolers than it would be checking just the public school.
Maybe they'd have to apply no child left behind type of regulations to homeschoolers.
That would defeat the whole purpose.
Homeschoolers can be educated under $500 a year.
And here we're spending $13,000 a year in D.C.
What do you think is the single act that would do the most to change the culture of corruption on Capitol Hill?
Is it campaign finance reform?
Is it ethics reform?
Is it changing the Constitution for term limits?
Or is there anything?
Ethical people in government right now because even if you had all the corrections made, if you don't have ethical people, there will still be corruption.
But it's not a lack of law that we...
The problem is it's too much power and they have all the money.
They take our money and they have the power and they have the clout, so therefore the incentive is there.
So I'm against regulating petitioners, the lobbyists, as bad as they are.
But that is a natural consequence of where's the action?
The action is there.
Go where the money is.
So they have the incentive.
Some go just out of self-defense, you know, taking my money.
I mean, I have a lot of sympathy for my district.
You know, they send up a lot of money and they want to get some back for their roads and we deserve to get it back again.
So they become lobbyists.
But it's the power that creates the lobbyists and the pressure and then the people selling out that the people who really got into trouble were dishonest and unethical.
But the system itself is dishonest and unethical because they have power that was never intended for the federal government to have.
I was going to be interested in your thoughts on the presidential primary system as it exists today and what type of reforms, if you think any, would be necessary you would support.
Not a whole lot.
I'd just like the states to make their own minds about it.
I don't want to have one solution for everybody's primary.
I do have, you know, some complaints about the system because it's not very competitive.
If you come to the conclusion that foreign policy and monetary policy and fiscal policy never changes, it'd be nice to have true competition.
And yet, in the third party system, it's practically impossible to compete on an even field because it's hard to get on ballots, it's hard to get in the debates, and it's very hard to compete.
So in many ways, we send our troops overseas to spread democracy and there's a few democratic shortcomings in this country that could be rather annoying.
But I try to be very careful not to overstep the bounds of the federal government.
I did write some legislation on that.
I had one that had to do with the presidential debates.
But if presidential debates are held by a private organization, they shouldn't have the authority.
But if the presidential debates are involving people who are using taxpayers' money, there is sort of a loophole on there.
But now the special interests have gotten so powerful, they don't even want the taxpayers' money because that special interest money talks louder than taxpayers' money and it's not as easy to regulate.
Thank you, Congressman.
And that brings to a close today's telegraph editorial board interview with Congressman Paul.
We'd like to thank the Congressman again for taking time out of his day to be with us.
And as always, we'd like to thank the students at Nashville High School North and South for helping to make this production possible.
Until next time, thank you and have a good day.
For profit, the system told them what was good.
Chaos played them what they wanted to hear.
This summer, if you only see one movie, we don't care because we're a radio station.
Chaos, it doesn't have to make sense.