03/07/08 – Jacob Hornberger – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton and this is Antiwar Radio.
I have looked into the abyss of the new American military tribunal system and its darkness stared back into me as well.
Speaking of the transcript of the hearing of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11th attacks, everybody knows the guy's guilty, but the problem is the process, and it's a big problem.
Help me welcome to the show Jacob Hornberger, he's the founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation, and is a radical individualist who is an expert in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, and cares very much for freedom, and as such is a great expert guest to have on the show when discussing topics like this.
Welcome to the show, Jacob.
Thank you, nice to be here, Scott.
Now this guy Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, I'll tell you, and I guarantee I'm going to get a ton of hate mail over this, but I think he's the one, I really do.
James Bamford's great book, Pretext for War, 9-11 Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies, tells the story pretty well about Ramzi Youssef and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and how these are the guys who, you know, their little terrorist group merged with Bin Laden's, and they had this plan to hijack planes and crash them into things going all the way back to 1995, and I believe it.
Basically when the state and journalists, especially people of James Bamford's caliber, say that, look, this is the guy who ran the Hamburg cell and plotted the 9-11 attacks, and he ought to obviously hang from his neck, and yet, Jacob, when I read these court documents about what happened at his Star Chamber trial recently, I was just absolutely shocked.
I couldn't get past page one without noticing that all the officers in this so-called court, their names are secret.
Every one of their names are redacted.
That's the first page.
You're absolutely right.
I mean, when you called it an abyss or darkness, that's exactly what describes this proceeding.
I mean, I have seen—I was in Havana, Cuba when the Cuban government, which is, of course, under communist Fidel Castro, was putting on trial the CIA-connected terrorists who had bombed Havana hotels in acts of terrorism, and I saw those proceedings on television, and I can tell you that they are eerily almost exactly the same as the kind of proceedings that are now taking place on the other side of Cuba, the American side of Cuba.
It's absolutely dark, eerie, ominous, and Americans better take note of it.
Well, I mean, and just the idea of you're going into a courtroom, and the judge and the jury and everybody else, that the public doesn't even get to know their names.
Their names are not even on the record?
The people holding this trial?
Well, it was actually a hearing to determine whether this man met the criteria of what they call an enemy combatant, which, of course, now encompasses Americans also, that category.
And you're right.
I mean, nobody's identified.
The man doesn't even have a lawyer because, just like in communist China, the Pentagon will not permit him to have a defense lawyer.
They hate criminal defense lawyers as much as the Chinese authorities do, so they give him what's called a personal representative who's unidentified who's just a lackey for the government.
I mean, you can see that.
He lets his client talk and make this enormous confession.
You'd never see that in a federal courtroom, never.
The federal judge, who is, as you know, supposedly independent, fair, and just, would be very, very cautious about letting any person who's accused.
I mean, Scott, we've had the finest criminal justice system in history, I would argue.
The federal court system that comes down to us through the Constitution, the framers, the fact that the Pentagon is now hijacking this thing, taking terrorists out of federal, accused terrorists out of federal court, putting them into this kangaroo proceeding, it is a very, very ominous, un-American, communist-like proceeding.
Do you remember last fall having slight hopes that when the Democrats took power that they would go back and revisit some of these things?
I had very little hopes on that.
I mean, I thought it was a good thing that there was sort of a counterbalancing of power with respect to Democrats and Republicans, but we all knew full well that it was the Democrats along with Republicans that passed the Patriot Act that just wilted in the face of these military tribunals.
I mean, the invasion of Iraq.
So it's difficult to put any faith in these people, and that's what makes it very, very frightening, the type of system that we're living in under, where Americans can be labeled enemy combatants, where they've got these military tribunals for enemy combatants, where they're removing people from federal court jurisdiction and putting them into these things.
It's very, very, it's not a good trend for America.
Here's something that I don't think you'll see in an American courtroom, which actually maybe you will in this day and age, but something from the transcript of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's hearing here where he says, yeah, Judge, but, you know, count A through F or whatever on that thing.
That's not quite right.
See, what really happened is this, and what you have is not what happened.
I mean, this is a guy who's basically confessing, but he's trying to help them get their facts straight about him or whatever.
And the judge says, yeah, yeah, but that's irrelevant.
I've already ruled that the judge, the president, whoever this guy is, this man whose name that we don't know, says, yeah, yeah, but I've already ruled that that's irrelevant, whether any of these accusations against you are true.
You're still an enemy combatant enough for me, basically, is what he's saying, I think.
Well, it's a shame because first he says you're going to be allowed to call witnesses on your behalf, which is a basic fundamental principle in American criminal jurisprudence.
You can call witnesses to establish that you're not guilty.
Well, as soon as this guy says, well, I want to call these two people to refute these elements of the charges that you've brought against me, the evidence to support that I'm an enemy combatant, the judge says, no, both your requests are denied because those aren't really relevant facts anyway.
This is ludicrous.
I mean, the guy has absolutely no right to defend himself.
And I think we need to point out something here, that the process by which a civilized nation takes people to judgment and punishes them is as important as anything else.
And that's why it is incumbent on every American who takes pride in what the framers developed to stand not just for the popular people, the high school principal who's accused of a crime that has connections in the community as well to do.
You've got to stand for the most despicable, unsympathetic, unpopular person in terms of due process of law and trial by jury and your criminal justice system because if you don't, then that wipes out the protections for everybody.
And, you know, I don't think the American population has forgotten that.
I mean, heck, we all learned that as kids, right, that it's better that 100 guilty men go free than one innocent man go to jail and all that kind of stuff.
I mean, I guess we've forgotten it enough that we're letting them get away with it, but it seems like this is still part of our popular culture and heritage, right, that we have a bill of rights and they don't and that kind of thing?
Well, you would think so.
I mean, I keep hoping that there's this spark inside the American people that says, this is our heritage and we're not going to let you take this heritage away, things like the presumption of innocence, a right to an attorney, a right to cross-examine witnesses.
And lest anybody think that these things can't be brought in federal court, keep in mind that Zacharias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker for 9-11, was prosecuted and convicted in federal court.
You've got Jose Padilla, another accused terrorist, who is now in federal court.
You've got the Detroit defendants that, by the way, were acquitted of the charges.
They were in federal court.
So there's absolutely no reason that the Pentagon should have this power of choosing, of saying if we don't want him to go into federal court, we've got the right to use our kangaroo proceedings over here to find him guilty.
And that's exactly what they are.
They're kangaroo proceedings designed to make it look like these people are getting judicial process when, in fact, the outcome is all preordained.
And I used the phrase earlier, the star chamber court.
That's something from the days of the American Revolution.
Can you tell us a little bit of the history of that?
Yeah, I mean, these were the old courts in England where the judge would just haul people up to essentially these types of proceedings where everything was stacked against them, didn't have a right to an attorney.
Sometimes they'd torture confessions out of them where the outcome guilty was going to be already made in advance.
But they create this aura of, oh, we've given him a trial.
Oh, look how fair we are, when, in fact, it wasn't fair at all.
The outcome was preordained, and it was just designed to make it look like judicial processes had been done.
I mean, what Americans need to do is this thing starts playing out.
They need to compare how the federal judge, for example, is operating in the Jose Padilla case.
From everything I can tell, this is a very fair, just, and independent judge in the Jose Padilla case.
She is saying Padilla's got a right to an attorney.
He may be accused of committing despicable acts, but he has a right to call witnesses.
He has a right to confront witnesses.
He has a right to trial by jury.
In other words, he has all the rights that, say, Scooter Libby had in federal court, who was also accused of a federal crime.
Terrorism is a federal crime.
It's on the statute books.
That's why Jose Padilla is now in federal court.
Compare those proceedings.
This is what every American needs to do to get a grasp of the difference here.
Compare that to what the military is now doing, not letting this man have a trial, not even hearing evidence as to what his conditions have been under CIA custody.
Has he been tortured?
Because he's alleged he's been tortured, and the judge certainly is giving short shrift to that allegation when we all know that torture has been an established policy of this government for quite some time now.
Yeah, he even said in there, yeah, I named some people, but some of those people I named them just because they were torturing me.
I said, yeah, yeah, I know him, and yeah, I know him.
And it's actually, I've got to recommend this transcript.
It's funny the honesty that comes forward through the broken English.
It's almost like the honesty of a 5-year-old child in a way, some of the things that come out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's mouth according to this transcript, assuming that the transcript isn't just made up.
Well, you can't help but think as you read this transcript that this guy, obviously his English isn't very good, but you also get the impression that his mental capabilities are not very good.
And one has to wonder what has happened to him.
If he wasn't crazy before they took him into custody, which he probably was a bit, there's no telling what's happened to his mental state since then.
But the other interesting aspect of that transcript is that everything is revolving.
All his statements seem to be revolving around his grievances against U.S. foreign policy.
And instead of this sort of hatred for America's freedom and values, which the president and the Pentagon have long maintained, he also points out there, very interestingly, that Osama bin Laden and U.S. officials were partners at one time when they were trying to end the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.
I think that's very revealing because a lot of Americans don't realize that Osama and the U.S. officials used to be partners.
In fact, he brings that up in the context of defending people that he says are innocent, saying, listen, a lot of these guys you have rounded up in here.
He says, I'm guilty.
I'm an enemy combatant.
But these other guys, a lot of them, they're just left over from the war against the Russians and they weren't allowed to ever go home again.
And so they lived in Afghanistan and they just got rounded up with the rest of us.
But they don't have anything to do with us.
They don't have anything to do with the Taliban or al-Qaida.
They're just some guy.
Well, that's the whole problem with Guantanamo.
They've rounded up a lot of innocent people.
That's the whole idea behind the judicial process is you determine who is innocent and who is guilty through a normal judicial process of indictment, criminal prosecution, trial by jury.
And people like Zacharias Moussaoui was convicted.
People like Timothy McVeigh was convicted.
He got the death sentence.
But we let the jury make those determinations, not the accuser.
So we know that the Pentagon has released a lot of people from Guantanamo that were obviously innocent because if they had any evidence against them, they certainly would still be there.
And so that's why this system is so horribly destructive.
It is why people around the world, one of the reasons why they're so angry with us, because we're violating our own principles here, Scott.
We're violating our own heritage as Americans, letting the military get away with this.
And we've also got to keep in mind that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, a very, very conservative court, has ruled that the Pentagon can treat Americans as enemy combatants too.
And so Americans would be wise to watch exactly how the Pentagon handles proceedings against foreign enemy combatants.
Well, if I can play the Republicans' advocate here, Jacob, they would say that, listen, you're right, except that you're looking at the wrong heritage.
You're looking at this as a criminal matter.
But the fact is, September 11th was an act of war.
And where we treated Ramzi Yousef like a criminal, we've now learned the lesson that we have to treat his uncle like an enemy.
Well, the only problem with that, though, is that they went to federal court with Zacharias Moussaoui, who they themselves said was part of the 9-11 attacks.
And that went to trial.
And he was convicted.
And he's now sitting in a federal penitentiary.
And so you would think that if they're going to be consistent, they've got to remove that conviction and put him in a prisoner of war camp.
I mean, it's ludicrous.
We all know that terrorism is on the federal statute books.
Also, they're prosecuting Jose Padilla for terrorism.
Now, they treated him as an enemy combatant first for about three years.
And through some legal trickery, they finally said, never mind, we'll go ahead and take him to federal court.
Now, let's make up our minds here.
We have something called equal protection of the laws, equal treatment under law.
Why should the Pentagon have the option of choosing federal court jurisdiction for some accused terrorists and these kangaroo courts for others?
That's a total violation of equal treatment, something that we've always long prided ourselves here in the United States.
But again, the proof is in the pudding.
They use federal courts to prosecute accused terrorists.
There's absolutely no reason why they can't do so.
They can't continue to do so.
Now, you brought up also the motivation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed revealed in this hearing and his mentioning of foreign policy.
And he says specifically.
In fact, he does this little rant comparing himself and bin Laden to George Washington and us to the Redcoats, which, you know, I'd have to say I agree with the second part of it at least.
But he says in there that the problem is American soldiers occupying the Arabian Peninsula and our support for Israel.
Simple as that.
And I think that, you know, not that I'm trying to be this guy's champion or anything, but here's the guy who organized the September 11th attacks.
This is the guy, the uncle of Ramzi Youssef, who bombed the World Trade Center the first time back in 93.
This is the guy who is the vanguard of the al Qaeda war against the United States.
And when he says this is why I did it, that's his answer.
Israel and American military occupation of the holy Arabian Peninsula.
Not they hate, you know, hot pants and hot dogs and MTV videos.
Not our decadent culture or our, you know, libertine way of life.
Our foreign policy, period.
That's exactly what we were saying throughout the 90s.
That unless you get rid of this pro-empire, pro-intervention, pro-militarist foreign policy, you're going to have terrorism.
You're going to have terrorism on American soil.
And U.S. officials would have nothing to do with it.
They didn't want to talk about that.
They were too much into this hubris of being the world's only remaining empire.
And then we reaped the whirlwind on 9-11.
And immediately after 9-11, we were there saying, look, it's time to reevaluate foreign policy again.
And, again, the response was, especially among conservatives, no, we're now at war.
We can't talk about reevaluating foreign policy.
So anything to avoid having to confront that the U.S. government's policies engender lots of anger and hatred around the world.
We see it in Latin America, too.
I mean those Latin Americans that are protesting against Bush and saying, go home, they're angry because of what the U.S. government has done.
They're not angry over what the American people have done.
And that's why if people want to get to the roots of the terrorist problem, whether it's domestic terrorism like Timothy McVeigh or foreign-inspired terrorism, they've got to start looking from one place, and that's Washington, D.C., and the policies of this federal government.
And until we do that, we're going to keep having all this nonsense.
And, you know, I hate to even have to say it, but I think I do have to say it.
That's not – and I know where you're coming from.
I know I can speak for you.
That doesn't say that the people who died that day deserved it.
It just says that the American foreign policy provoked it.
And, in fact, you mentioned Latin America.
I had a friend who was in Brazil walking down the streets of Rio de Janeiro.
And it's just like the old movies here in the States where everybody's watching TV through the store window.
And he's watching September 11th unfold on TV on the streets of Rio.
And the people were not cheering, but they were kind of doing that, clench their fist and hold it close to their chest and kind of say, yeah, to themselves.
These are the people in Brazil who were kind of happy that Americans were finally getting their comeuppance.
That was their reaction on the streets that day.
Well, that's because there's so much anger against this federal government.
It's drug war internationally.
It's foreign intervention.
I mean the Middle East is not the only place where the federal government has intervened and caused massive death and chaos.
I mean Central America, there's been foreign interventions there, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua.
I mean there's a lot of anger in the world.
But the analogy to this, Scott, is the Timothy McVeigh bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.
When that happened, we said, look, it's time to look at what motivated McVeigh and what did U.S. officials say.
Now this was under Clinton.
Oh, no, no, no, we can't examine what the federal government's policy is that motivated him because that would be justifying his act.
Well, if you don't analyze it, then if you keep doing it, you're going to still keep getting the Timothy McVeighs.
So we kept harping, let's talk about Waco, let's talk about the massacre at Waco.
Notice that since the government has not made any more Waco attacks, and that's in large part because libertarians have protested so much about Waco, there have been no more Timothy McVeigh-type attacks that have arisen in the United States.
All we're saying is the same thing on foreign policy.
You dismantle this intervention, this empire, this militarism, and then you lose the threat of those foreign-inspired terrorist attacks.
If you go back to the Ramzi Youssef trial, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which was no different in principle than the 2001.
I mean they're both terrorist bombings.
One took more lives than the other, but they went to federal court, and they indicted Ramzi Youssef.
That was the right thing to do.
They went through a process.
They had him convicted.
That's the process that we Americans stand for.
And he stood before that federal judge at sentencing, and he let loose about how angry he was.
If you read the transcript of what he said to the judge, it was just this angry, angry tirade, and it was all addressed toward the US government and its policies.
And it's important.
This distinction is important because a lot of people think – in their minds, they conflate our country with the federal government.
Foreigners don't do that.
They draw a very careful distinction between the federal government and its policies and the American people in our country.
And they like the country.
They love our principles.
They love our people.
They don't like what the federal government has been doing to them overseas.
And that's what Americans need to reevaluate, not their principles, not their due process of law, not their constitution.
They need to reevaluate what their government has been doing to people overseas.
But the problem is, from the terrorists' so-called point of view, as you say, they distinguish between Americans and the American government pretty well.
But it's getting harder and harder for them to distinguish between the American government and their local dictatorship, or harder and harder for them to distinguish between the American government and the Israeli government.
And that's what brings this trouble our way.
Well, that's right, because there's inevitably going to be a spillover.
And obviously it's not a foolproof system because you've got the terrorists, for example, that are bombing the World Trade Center that is not the government.
And so all of a sudden the American people are having to pay a price for what their government is doing.
And what Americans just simply have to ask themselves, is it worth it?
Is it worth it to live like this where you've got a Pentagon hijacking a criminal justice system, where you've got Americans now subject to Pentagon arrest and incarceration, torture, possibly even execution after a military tribunal?
Is all this worth it for a bankrupt foreign policy when all you've got to do is change the policy and you can have a fairly normal life again, a free life, instead of the kind of stuff that's going on today?
Jacob, have you been following this story about the John Warner Defense Authorization Act and its apparent gutting of Posse Comitatus and the Insurrection Act?
No, I confess I really haven't, Scott.
Now this is something that's getting so little attention, but apparently all 50 governors have signed on to this letter opposing this.
And apparently the battle's already lost, but it has to do, and I don't know the exact details, but it has to do with the President's ability, and I love it, the excuse is Katrina, that now the President can take control over the State Guard units without even asking.
They're basically his by default now.
And this is the kind of revolution within the form that it seems like the more severe these revolutions are, the less media attention they get.
But this seems like something pretty severe and perhaps pretty permanent.
Well, it's just part of this trend toward militarism in America.
I mean we've got the militarization of the border on our southern border.
You've got this Berlin Wall fence taking place down there.
You've got troops being sent down there.
You've got troops being sent into New Orleans.
It just wouldn't surprise me at all.
You've got now the Pentagon having the power to arrest Americans in the dead of night or whenever, take them off to some secret camp, do whatever to them as enemy combatants.
I mean we haven't lived in a system like that.
We've always had judicial warrants that you can't arrest somebody without a warrant, or if you do, you have to take him before a magistrate within three or four days.
That system is gone now, and I think a lot of Americans just don't realize it, that the military now has supremacy over the citizen.
They can now pick anyone they want up in the United States, label him an enemy combatant, and cart him away to a secret facility and do whatever to him.
That's a revolutionary change in American society post-9-11.
Now the big scandal, of course, is it's never when American citizens are the victims, but when other government employees are the victims.
That's when it becomes a big scandal, and of course I'm referring to the firing of all the U.S. attorneys.
What's your Future Freedom Foundation perspective on that?
It seems to us that it's just part of this power game, that when the power bug bites people in Washington, they can't get enough of it.
So it's not enough, for example, for Bush to control both houses of Congress, or it's not enough to get all these federal judges that will do his bidding when cases come before the federal courts.
He's also got to campaign for governors and state legislators.
The urge for power, so obviously he wants a lackey as attorney general, the kind of person that he can go to and say, hey, I need an opinion here, and the attorney general responds, tell me what you want me to say, and that's what I'll say, instead of somebody with integrity and independence of thought.
So he wants U.S. attorneys in there, which are fairly powerful people.
They can indict and prosecute people, including government officials, for criminal offenses.
Obviously you want your lackeys in there so you don't have anything to worry about, and this is exactly, Scott, what's going on in foreign policy.
When you go to Iraq or you go to Afghanistan, it's all designed just to get your man in office, just like it was your local governor over here or your local representative.
They just want their people in power, and so it's just this thirst for power that drives these people, and unfortunately freedom is the one that pays the price.
Yeah, I forget if it was Henry Kissinger or one of these guys who had the famous quote about, really, you're better off being America's enemy than our friend, because if you're our friend, we're going to stab you in the back, whereas if you're our enemy, you have a little bit of cushion there.
And you mentioned Pakistan.
I don't know if you saw the article in the New York Times, and then the Australian picked up on it yesterday, about America's already planning for who to replace Musharraf with.
You know, this guy Musharraf is, best I can tell, bent over backwards to do whatever he's told since September 11th.
They've already got the knives out for him, and it's already in the New York Times.
Well, I mean, that's the way the game is played.
The only reason Musharraf is in office is not because he's a democratically elected president, because we all know he's a military dictator who took over in a coup.
He was partners with the Taliban.
The only reason he's in power is that he knelt and kissed the ring of the US empire after 9-11.
And I don't know if you've seen the movie 300, but when you see that Persian king where he tells King Leonidas, look, if you will just kneel before me, I will let you be king of all Greece.
That's essentially the mindset of the US empire.
We will let you be dictator.
Saddam Hussein will let you be – Musharraf will let you be in charge of your country.
Just kneel before us and do our bidding when we want you to do our bidding, and then you're free to do whatever you want in your country.
That's a morally bankrupt policy.
That's not what America should be standing for, Scott.
We ought to be a republic.
That's what this country was founded on, as a republic.
Leave all these regimes alone.
Dismantle this empire and restore a republic.
That's what we're fighting for.
And why don't you tell us a bit about that?
Who's we, this Future Freedom Foundation?
Well, we're a libertarian organization, and most of our focus throughout the years has been on economic liberty, the principles of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and so forth.
But we've long recognized we've been one of the leading fighters in the libertarian movement in favor of civil liberties.
And for a long time there was some ambivalence in the libertarian movement about this.
I mean there's a lot of libertarians that came out of the conservative movement where conservatives look at civil liberties as just constitutional technicalities and sort of like Fourth Amendment seizures and drug cases and no big deal sort of thing, a search and seizure of a car or a Miranda warning.
But we kept saying throughout the 90s it's not that simple.
You've got the potential for massive erosion of liberty here.
And sure enough, post-9-11, that's exactly what has happened.
With this military power, what's going on with Guantanamo, I mean this power to label Americans enemy combatants and arrest them, that's the biggest assault on freedom that can possibly take place.
I mean that's what we used to rail against in the Soviet Union, not just their socialism but the fact that their police force could go out and arrest anybody willy-nilly and just cart them away.
That's the kind of system we now live under.
And this is what we keep trying to tell libertarians, that as important as Mises and Hayek and economic liberty is, those now, those infringements are now – have dropped to secondary importance.
What now trumps all the other erosions of freedom is this power to arrest people and cart them away and treat them as enemy combatants.
There is no power more powerful than that.
And so the Future of Freedom Foundation, we're fighting hard to warn people this has got to be reversed because if it's not, there's no way you can have a free society.
And so we're having an enormous conference trying to educate people on how important this erosion, this particular erosion of liberty is in the context of foreign policy.
What's this conference?
Well, it's on June 1 through 4, and I think it's going to be one of the most important, the most exciting conferences that I've been exposed to in the 30 years I've been a libertarian.
We have put together a lineup of 24 all-star speakers.
They're liberals, libertarians, conservatives.
Every one of them has been carefully chosen for their ardent and enthusiastic devotion to civil liberties and against this empire interventionist foreign policy.
And we've got just superstars.
We've got Andrew Napolitano from Fox News.
We've got Ron Paul, who you know has just announced his candidacy for president, so that's going to be an added charge.
He's going to be talking about US foreign policy.
We've got Joseph Margulies, the lead counsel in Russell v.
Bush, one of the Guantanamo cases.
We've got Karen Katowski, former Pentagon colonel.
Robert Scheer, the liberal colonist that used to work at the LA Times and now with the San Francisco Chronicle.
We've got all the libertarian stars it seems, Lou Rockwell, Bob Higgs, Sheldon Richman, Jim Bovard, Yvonne Elon, Anthony Gregory.
I mean the list is incredible.
We've got liberals like Joanne Mariner who is a human rights watch attorney taking a leading role in the torture and rendition cases.
She was recently the subject of a profile in a Nat Hentoff column.
I mean we've got the most incredible lineup that you can ever imagine.
And again, it's designed primarily for the libertarian movement of saying you need to get up to snuff on what's going on here.
You need to educate yourself because it's up to the libertarians in my opinion to lead the rest of the country to this free society.
And if libertarians cannot defend their positions eloquently and passionately, then it's going to be very difficult to sell our position to the rest of the country.
And so what we're saying is, okay, economic liberty is fine, but that's of secondary importance at this point.
Of prime importance is the civil liberty.
Well, it's great of you to do it.
You're absolutely right.
We've got to be the libertarians, and if the libertarians don't have their head on straight, we can just forget about the republicans and the democrats out there.
I agree with you.
I mean the liberals have been very, very good on civil liberties.
I mean you've got the ACLU fighting this torture and rendition and so forth, human rights watch.
The conservatives have been total disasters.
But on economic liberty, I mean we know that liberals are just disasters themselves.
But the problem with conservatives, they're disasters in both places, economic liberties and civil liberties.
In my opinion, Scott, it's got to be the libertarians that lead this country out of this mess, and there is a way out of this mess.
It's with libertarian principles applied not only domestically but in foreign policy as well.
And if we can show Americans that here is your answer, this is the way out of this mess, out of this morass, then I think we've got a shot.
But that means it's incumbent on libertarians to lead the way, and that's why we're having this conference.
You can't just lead the way on economic liberty anymore.
You've got to lead the way on civil liberty as well, and that means foreign policy because foreign policy is the means by which they're taking away our civil liberty.
All right.
Well, you make sure to get a hold of me toward the end of May so I can have you back on the show to promote this thing and get as many people out there as possible.
This will be in D.C.?
It will be in Reston, Virginia at the Hyatt Regency, which is a really beautiful part of northern Virginia.
It's right outside Dulles Airport.
All the details are on our website at fff.org.
Got the whole schedule up, all the speakers.
And by the way, the people are effectively paying just about the cost of the meals, more or less.
The rest of it is heavily subsidized, and so there's no way that anybody's going to get a better deal ever where they can meet so many all-stars in one place and learn so much in one place on the most important burning issue of our time.
So that's at fff.org.
Okay, and just to be perfectly clear, when you say subsidized, you don't mean by the state.
No.
We have never taken state monies and never will.
These are subsidized by donors that just feel very, very strongly how important this is, and that's how we've been able to keep the price down to the $4.95 level, which, like I say, just about covers meals.
And then we've got some super-discounted rates from the Hyatt Regency.
This is one of the nicest Hyatts in the country, and we've got the rates down, I think, to $144 a night down from well over $200 and something.
So it's a great bargain, and it's going to be a fantastic conference.
All right, everybody.
Jacob Hornberger, he's the founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
I recommend everybody check out their website, sign up for the daily email, and the rest at fff.org.
Thanks very much, Jacob.
Scott, I've got to tell you, I've got to tip my hat to you.
You're doing fantastic work with this radio series, and thank you very much for having me on.
It's really an honor to be one of your guests.
Well, thanks a lot.
Take care, bud.
Okay, bye-bye.