09/21/10 – James Bovard – The Scott Horton Show

Oh yeah, I got Jim Bovard on the phone.
Hey, Jim.
Hey, Scott.
How you doing?
Thanks for having me on.
I'm doing great, man.
How are you?
Doing good.
Doing good.
Appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Y'all know James Bovard.
He's the most successful libertarian journalist in world history.
He's the author of The Farm Fiasco and the Fair Trade Fraud, Freedom in Chains and Feeling Your Pain.
Ugh, I just want to spit every time I think of Bill Clinton's face.
And then, of course, Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, and Attention Deficit Democracy.
And man, if y'all haven't read Attention Deficit Democracy, I'm serious, it ain't just because this guy's my pal.
It's because that book is awesome.
You've got to read it.
You have to read it or you don't know.
I mean that.
Go read that freaking book.
All right.
Now, let's talk about the federal pigs here for a minute, the FBI agents.
I saw somewhere in here, I have a tab, Jim, where you were talking about the Patriot Act and this supposed Civil Liberties Board where the government, since the judges sure as hell won't do it, I guess the Civil Liberties Board is going to protect our freedom from the Patriot Act, huh?
Well, you know, it's interesting to see how these scams originate.
Back in 2004, Bush was trying to gin up support in Congress for reenacting some of the worst parts of the Patriot Act.
There was a sunset provision and Bush was saying, look, you know, don't worry, there's not going to be abuse.
So what he did was on his own, Bush created a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and put all of his own people on it.
And not surprisingly, everything that Bush did was compatible with civil liberties and privacy.
So it was a big surprise.
You know, it was a bunch of long, almost all the board members were long-term GOP hacks and they were so servile that they even endorsed that National Security Agency warrantless wiretaps on Americans' phone calls and emails.
They had no trouble with that.
I mean, it was, you know, there was almost nothing that, well, there was nothing that Bush could do that they would have any objection to.
Yeah, like the Democratic Congress, just the rubber stamp.
Well, yeah, it was GOP was controlling Congress until that.
In 2006, Democrats took over and then Congress mandated that the board would have be a little more independent, but it never really got any independent or even pseudo-independent members.
Part of what was fascinating...
Meanwhile, they raced to legalize the warrantless wiretapping themselves.
Right.
Both parties were guilty that the GOP was more guilty, but they could not have done it without the Democrats.
And the thing that was important is Bush put this, you know, put this window dressing out there and ordered enough support for extending the Patriot Act.
Congress did that even though there was no evidence that the power had not been abused.
We later found out there were a lot more abuses that the FBI knew of, a lot more abuses than what they admitted at the time.
So so this is still out there.
Senator Joe Lieberman, two years ago, was urging Bush to put some independent members there.
It's important to to have to put people on that board to preserve the public's faith in our promise to protect their privacy and civil liberties.
I mean, this is all about public faith.
In other words, it's about a sham.
Senator Lieberman never gave a damn about privacy or civil liberties.
He's someone who's acting as if he thinks the government should have boundless power, especially on against anything labeled terrorism.
Well, yeah, he invokes the powers of the Chinese Politburo as his precedent outright on TV and doesn't even know he should be ashamed at all.
Oh, I had missed that.
Oh, yeah.
He goes, hey, China has the power to turn off the Internet.
Their state can.
How come we can't?
Well, I wouldn't.
Awesome.
I got him to laugh.
Y'all do you hear it?
Well, all right.
You know, well, you know, it's still a couple hours before happy hour here.
Yeah.
Well, and I wasn't even joking.
I was just like reciting an anecdote from the newspaper that I read, you know?
Well, yeah, I'm it's good that I hadn't heard that before.
Else I wouldn't have had a fresh laugh.
So but almost anything about Senator Lieberman is totally believable because that guy is a three star rascal.
Yeah, rascal.
Indeed, I think that might be the best use of the word rascal on this show so far.
Jim, it's called a euphemism.
Yeah.
So it's just a family friendly, family friendly radio.
That's right.
Yeah, this this could be on a station licensed by the Federal Pigs one day.
So well, we got to get in the habit of not using that for it all the time.
Amen.
OK, because I know otherwise you would be throughout this whole rant would have been.
Well, you know, it's just you know, it's just a question of pre happy hour versus post happy hour.
Right.
Well, I'm lucky I have a morning show, especially with you on the East Coast and me on the West.
You know, so the article is at The Washington Times.
Correct.
And it's called Abolish the Phony Privacy Board.
Panel was designed to rubber stamp constitutional infringement.
And really, it's funny because this thing that could have showed us sort of at least was promoted as something really important is really nothing.
It's not worth anything.
But, you know, maybe the crawl at the bottom of CNN or something that, yeah, there's this powerless thing that's there to make you feel a little bit better about yourself or whatever.
And that's about it.
Right.
Well, I purple horseshoes to the lucky charms.
Big freaking deal.
Yeah.
I mean, actually, this is worse, worse than useless because this so-called oversight board, it's a lot more likely to induce complacency than to protect freedom.
I mean, for the last nine years, trampling the Constitution is a no fault offense in Washington.
And anything that prevents Americans from recognizing that makes it less likely people will stand up for their rights and liberties.
Yeah, well, there we go.
Well, I hadn't mean to think that's the that's the tension deficit democracy in a nutshell right there.
Oh, I said also, there's a really great section on torture that everybody ought to also read.
Yeah.
See, that's the thing we're talking with.
We've had some really great interviews so far today already.
Andy Worthington and Elaine Castle both were on.
We've talked about a lot of these civil liberties abuses.
And Elaine Castle really waxed on about the fall of the republic, really the end of the rule of law, the end of any reasonable belief that these institutions have any right to rule us at all.
You know, things are getting bad, Jim.
Torture is a wonderful example of that because it's interesting.
People think of me as being very cynical, but but over the last, well, certainly in the first few years after 9-11, I erred on the other side because there were a number of times I thought the Bush people had gone too far and that there was going to be a backlash.
I especially thought that in May of 2004, when first we had the photos and then Timor-Herzegovina and then those John Yoo memos leak out.
I said, holy shazam, this is going to cause a backlash.
It didn't.
I mean, Bush was practically bragging about it with a macho reelection campaign.
The Democrats were afraid to mention it.
And here we are six years later, there is no high ranking federal official has been held liable for this regime of torture.
Well, and it just goes on and they you know, this is one of the things we talked about with Lancaster, too, is this guy, Binyam Mohamed, who we all know was innocent, who was tortured with razor blades and pointing his finger at Jose Padilla for a plot to set off a radioactive dirty bomb, which, of course, by the way, the footnote is he'd read a satire years ago about how to make a nuclear bomb in your kitchen in Rolling Stone magazine.
And that was what he was thinking over something that included swinging the uranium around over your head in a bucket in order to enrich it to weapons grade.
And on based on this, John Ashcroft from Red Square in Moscow, Jim, announced that Jose Padilla, an American citizen arrested by civilian federal police on American soil at Chicago Airport, was now being turned over.
The judge said, bring him before me.
And they said no.
And they gave him to Donald Rumsfeld and they held him in a military brig in South Carolina.
And they let the CIA torture him out of his mind for six years or something until the Supreme Court was about to have a case.
I mean, I couldn't you couldn't make that up.
And you're a talented writer, man.
This is insanity going on here.
Well, but but it's also institutionalized and it's systemic or it has at least been systemic for a lot of the last eight or nine years.
I don't know how much of this stuff is ongoing or how much how much how much of this stuff might have ended versus merely pause.
But it's fascinating with the Jose Padilla case.
That was before.
I've forgotten how many federal judges heard bits and pieces of that case.
But you had clear evidence or at least probable cause that there had been torture going on.
And the judge has never dug into that.
So if the federal judges don't have the courage to dig into torture of an American citizen here in the U.S. in front of them, you know, and it doesn't get picked up by the higher courts, where exactly, you know, maybe that's why we have the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, just to make sure that there is that final defense.
Right.
Then we'll be safe.
Thank God for them.
Right.
Absolutely.
I mean, George Bush, same difference.
Yes.
Yes.
Thank you.
Maybe he's easier to confuse with Jesus, the son of a son of something.
All right, y'all.
Well, we know, too, don't we?
All right.
Hang on, everybody.
We'll be right back with Jim Bovard after this.
Attention deficit democracy.
Read it.
Make your brother in law read it.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio and Liberty Radio Network.
Right now, I'm talking with Jim Bovard.
He's the author of Shakedown, how the government screws you from A to Z.
And if you go look at his Wikipedia entry, you will see that he's been marked for death by every government agency around.
They hate his guts and all they do is call him a liar because how good his reporting is .
The best one of all.
And that's saying something is attention deficit democracy.
And one of the things that you talk about in this book, Jim, is what you call battered citizen syndrome.
And I was wondering if you could explain what that is and all its nuance and detail in the greatness of your wisdom for all the wonderful people listening here today.
March for death.
Am I?
Oh, my goodness.
Well, like you didn't know that.
Well, no, no.
See, there is one benefit that means I was able to take a business expense deduction for the bulletproof windows.
Yeah, there you go.
See, you write that off on your IRS forms.
I bet they won't bother you at all about it.
Well, yeah, I'm going to hold my breath on that one.
Battered citizen syndrome is basically what the government does when it's constantly pushing one fear button after another, constantly trying to make people almost afraid of their own shadow and thereby making them a lot more submissive than they otherwise would be.
It's a way to undermine any sense of criticism or even tolerance of criticism for much of the population.
The Bush administration did this very well after 9-11.
That was part of the reason why there was almost a well, a lot of places muzzled any criticism of the government at that point.
And they especially played that card very well in the 2004 presidential campaign.
They were always putting out these warnings about terrorist attacks and which somehow they often turn out to be bogus.
But there was a Cornell study that showed that after after 9-11, each time that the government issued a terrorist warning, the president's approval rating rose by roughly three percent.
And that was the margin by which George Bush beat John Kerry in 2004.
Yeah.
And they ran a bunch of commercials.
Remember the wolves all preparing to attack you?
That was, yes.
I mean, that was those were just some of the most bizarre ones in history.
A favorite example of mine, a favorite example of how they were pushing the hot button was there was a warning that the FBI put out just before July 4th in 2004 during the election season.
And the folks at the FBI were very worried about beer coolers floating down the river that might have bombs in them.
Well, I mean, that's the ultimate way to stir up the redneck vote.
My favorite one was on a top of the hour news break.
I heard one time I've Googled the hell out of this and never was able to find another reference to it anywhere.
But I guess ABC News at the top of the hour on the radio or something.
And it was there's a terrorism, Al Qaeda threat against a school somewhere in Texas.
Look out, I'm gone.
Come on, man.
Well, there's like a thousand counties in Texas with, you know, at least a dozen schools in each one or something at a minimum, even out in West Texas.
I mean, how many schools are there in Texas?
Anybody ever counted how many schools there are in Texas?
And this is the kind of thing that they're threatening people with.
Somebody could kill your kid today if you're one of the tens of millions of people who live in that gigantic state.
Well, and part of the real frustration was that there were so many points that the government was obviously, you know, either lying or putting out stuff that should have been shot down.
But the media or editors were very often afraid to criticize it.
And it was almost as if the government had free reign to mess with people's minds.
And there was the the illusion that you had a critical media and there was a check and balance, but it didn't exist for the vast for the most part.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
I try not to make it personal too much.
I mean, I hate cops personally and that kind of thing.
But, you know, my politics is mostly about stop picking on the poor Somalis.
No, it's not about me.
But I really resent the hell out of this because there's somebody that I care very much for who had some mental health issues.
And George Bush didn't tell her, don't be afraid.
It's going to be all right.
He told her, oh, and just shoved her off the edge of the cliff.
So they're going to kill you.
They're going to kill you if I don't protect you.
And and and put, you know, drove her into insanity, Jim.
Well, that's sad.
And that's one out of a lot of people who live kind of on the edge of things, man.
You know, well, and I damn, dude, you know what Harry Brown has said.
Harry Brown would have said it's going to be OK.
Harry Brown, it was one of his finest hours after 9-11 because he was very forthright.
He was not, you know, he was never kowtowing.
Someone mentioned that he even put out a story in the same day as the attacks talking about the U.S. foreign policy.
So Harry Brown, you know, showed that he was made of a lot sterner stuff and some of the then at least one of the subsequent L.P. presidential nominees.
So but the thing about pushing people over the edge, there were vast numbers of people who were basically made more paranoid and more rattled by the government's constant constant fear mongering.
And I mean, not everybody's got a really strong Bovardian constitution about them.
You know what I mean?
Well, I don't know that, you know, it's not so much a strong constitution.
It's just that, you know, I've been writing about these kind of government stuff for decades and I'm used I'm fairly accustomed to government BS.
I mean, and if someone's out there in front of a microphone and whooping it up, I mean, like, OK, OK, what's his line of crap?
So but unfortunately, the folks who should have been checking on some of that stuff to simply roll over or or there were a lot of good journalists who stuff never got to print because of cowardly editors.
Yeah, well, and the other thing, too, as long as I'm pissed off about it is, you know, the twenty nine hundred something or maybe it was high twenty eight hundred something people died on September 11th.
That's a lot of friends and families whose dearest loved ones and best friends were exploited to kill a million Iraqis, you know, and worse all over the not worse, but and more all around the world.
I mean, you imagine that's your own family getting exploited like that, Jim.
Did you have friends there?
Do you know anybody that was personally affected by that?
I knew someone who was on the I knew socially a little bit, someone who was on the plane to crash in the Pentagon.
And there were folks, folks I knew who worked right next to the World Trade Center towers.
But this is this is what politicians do.
It's the same with you know, it was it was the same with the Pat Tillman.
Who was killed by American forces in Afghanistan.
And then there was this massive effort to kind of paint him as a as a war hero and as a victim of the Taliban.
And the government knew that was a lie from the get go.
So this is this is what politicians do.
And it's naive to expect expect politicians as a class to become clean or honest or or decent because so many things have happened after 9-11.
They were just they were the kind of things that decent people would not do.
But this is, you know, this is why we have politicians.
Yeah.
Well, and you're really right, I think, in the book to compare it to like an abusive relationship.
You wonder why a woman would put up with some guy beating the hell out of her all the time and telling her how worthless she is all the time and whatever.
She's got feet.
She can go, but she stays for some reason.
And it's because he's already completely screwed her mind over so bad that she's helpless.
Basically, she can't take care of herself.
She can't choose to leave because that option's already been taken away from her.
And that's where we are.
Right.
We just sit back and more Joe Lieberman for everybody.
Well, until we're all dead, I guess.
Yeah.
I mean, there's there are some Americans that would fit in that category.
I think or I hope that most would not.
I think some of our I think some of the time have gone on.
Some have caught on to more of the government fraud.
I you know, as far as how many and what the percentage is, I don't know.
And it's it's also a question of how easy it will be for the government to pull some other, you know, hobgoblin out of a hat and frighten masses back into submission then.
Yeah.
Well, the other thing is, too, is it's and I know you talk about this and many of your books is that the outrage has come in such rapid fire that you just can't even stay outraged at any of them long enough.
There's so many different things that come out day after day after day and all the different people who were tortured and all the different outrages of the with the wiretaps and the basically the NSA's ownership of the American telecom industry and the involvement of the Israelis and that should have been able to stop 9-11 maybe didn't try and on and on and on that like, what are you going to do?
You might as well just smoke a joint and forget about it.
Well, it's unhealthy to stay very angry all the time.
It's you know, it'd be difficult to find a better recipe for misery.
And yet it's just shocking to see, for instance, what the federal courts have done with this with this doctor of state secrets that have basically allowed the government to hide all the details of its torture scandal.
And you have even so-called libertarian leaning judges like Alex Kaczynski supporting that.
They're in the Ninth Circuit out there in California.
So it's it's it's stunning to see how badly the system has done so far as far as any kind of as far as fundamental correction of the errors after 9-11.
Yeah, well, we may just have one more chance at a Ron Paul presidency.
I don't really know.
I can't really believe that Republican Party voters get their act together.
The American people register in time in their states and make it happen.
But I got a I got a reasonable exploit expectation that he's going to make his offer of peace and liberty on a silver platter one more time.
And at least it'll be a fun little chapter in the final suicide of America that they turned this guy down twice when he had the answer to nine out of 10 other everything's.
But well, it might not be a suicide in America.
Things might work out better than you expect or I expect.
Well, that's true, too.
And you know what, Jim?
I'm glad you said that, because I like to end on a positive note.
And since I brought up Ron anyway, first time I ever interviewed Ron was at the I think that was the first time I yeah, it certainly was the first time I met you in person as well in Atlanta, Georgia, at the LP convention.
I actually I now remember running up to you and going, Jim Bovard and shaking your hand for the first time.
Now that I think about it anyway.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But that was five minutes before your big score.
Oh, please.
So I ran up and interviewed Ron Paul and I asked him, Karen Katowski's question.
Actually, there's only one Ron Paul.
Like, why should we even bother anymore, man?
How doomed are we with, you know, and no reasonable expectation that there will ever be any more Ron Paul's, you know.
And he said, oh, yeah.
Well, not too long ago, we thought the Soviet Union was going to last at least for the rest of our lives.
And then it was gone.
And, you know, you never know how things are going to be.
So just keep teaching people about liberty and don't doomsay, because that's not really what it's about.
And so I try to think of that when I get depressed, because it is like just Armando always says, Sisyphus roll in the boulder uphill.
We never really get anywhere, but we got to keep pushing the damn thing anyway.
Well, and the thing is, it's cheaper than therapy.
Yeah.
Well, boy, I'm telling you what, I can't write like you, man.
So this microphone without this, I'd already hurled myself off of something tall, I'm sure.
Hey, but it was great to see your piece in the Christian Science Monitor last week.
It's great to see you break into a national paper like that.
Hey, thanks a lot.
I really appreciate that.
And I had a couple of really good editors that helped me put it together and make sure it was right before I went on.
So I don't take all the credit, but.
Well, still, it's huge to have it out there in a hard line piece.
You know, it's raising hell out there.
Well, thanks, Jim.
You sure set a good example to try to follow.
Not that I could ever live up to it, but I don't mind trailing in your dust either.
That's a good place to be.
Well, it's not dust.
It's great to see you busting forward.
All right, everybody.
That's Jim Bovard, my pal, Mutual Admiration Society going on here.
The website is Jim Bovard or James Bovard, right?
Yeah, correct.
Dotcom.
And the book, again, is Attention Deficit Democracy.
That's the latest one.
And it's so important.
I really beg you guys to go out and get it.
Thanks, Jim.
Hey, thanks, Scott.