For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
I'm joined on the phone by the great James Vovar.
He's the author of a whole armful of books.
The Farm Fiasco, The Fair Trade Fraud, Feeling Your Pain, Freedom in Chains, Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, Attention Deficit Democracy, and I'm sure I left off eight or ten.
Welcome to the show, Jim.
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me back on.
It's great to talk to you again, and everybody run out and get Attention Deficit Democracy.
It's a great book.
So, Jim, I know you've been paying close attention to the so-called Attorney General of the United States, Alberto Gonzalez, and the recent scandals surrounding him.
And so I thought maybe we could just start off with something that's gotten basically no attention on this show, and that is the firing of the U.S. Attorneys.
Why did they get fired and why should I care?
You know, in general, the firing of the U.S. Attorney is not something that you should lose any sleep over.
I mean, some of them are good, many of them are rascals.
But in this case, it looks like it's some clear obstruction of justice, especially with Carol Lamb out there in Southern California.
It looked like she was hot on the trail of another Republican Congressman that she might have been able to send to prison as she sent Duke Cunningham to prison.
But the folks in Justice Department were unhappy about that, and that was apparently a major reason why she got axed.
We don't know all the reasons.
The Bush team has, you know, changed their story quite a few times already.
You know, it's almost like you need an hourly update as far as what the latest alibi is.
You know, Gonzalez has made some false statements and testimony on this.
He's changed his comments in public on it a number of times.
It's the usual thing where he's practically trying to portray himself as a victim now.
But the thing that's really important here, my impression is that Gonzalez is soon going to be out of there.
But Gonzalez, you know, nobody ever thought he was the mastermind of the Bush administration.
But he's important because once you lose the President's guy at the Justice Department, there are all these other scandals, all these other violations of law that I think have occurred over the last five or six years.
And the Bush team has done a pretty good job of keeping the lid on most of those scandals.
Once you have the attorney general being knocked off, once you have uncertainty, some of these lids and these scandals could come loose.
And once that happens, you know, Bush could be far closer to impeachment than what most people expect right now.
OK, now this lady, Carol Lamb, you said she's the prosecutor who put Duke Cunningham in prison, right?
Right.
Yeah, she was U.S. attorney in Southern California.
So everybody else was just fired to cover for her?
No, no, no.
There were dubious charges on a number of the other ones that were fired.
And my impression is that most of the ones that were fired were simply not docile or pliant enough for the White House or for Karl Rove.
Don't have all the, you know, the details on this are still coming out.
The Gonzalez's former chief of staff is testifying today, so I guess we might learn some more from that.
But there are serious questions of major abuses on a number of these firings.
By and large, I mean, you know, it's so rare for a government employee to get fired.
It's almost like the, you know, it's almost like finding an honest politician.
Right.
So by itself, that's not the story.
And the point is not to have sympathy for the folks who lost their jobs because this is a presidential appointment and, you know, these things, presidents change their mind.
But the process here looks very suspicious.
And I think that there's going to be other things coming out as far as some of the motivations for these firings that will look a whole lot worse than the firings themselves.
Yeah, I mean, they should know by now that government can get away with mistreating American citizens just fine, but you can't mess with government employees like that without it blowing up in your face.
Well, it's interesting how you get more of the others.
It's actually how some of the Washington media has a lot more sympathy for the U.S. attorneys or for Kyle Sampson, the former chief of staff, than they do for average citizens who have been borehogged by the Justice Department.
You know, the Bush White House has pushed a number of, you know, hot buttons on their prosecutions.
They've had a lot of obscenity cases.
That's been an obsession with some people in the White House, I guess, pandering to some of their political base on that.
And there have been a number of obscenity prosecutions which were just completely, well, shameless and did nothing to achieve to make Americans any safer.
But just, you know, gave some folks the chance to grandstand.
And, of course, one of the most abusive cases was the Tommy Chong case, who was, you know, a massive federal investigation indicted by the, he was selling bongs out of Southern California.
So he was indicted in Western Pennsylvania.
They had some Bush U.S. attorney there who was grandstanding, trying to ruin his life.
So, so many of these U.S. attorneys are very pliant and are, you know, people that are planning to run for Congress or for governor or something like that.
And, you know, it's absurd to think that there's a purity of justice here that's somehow been painted by the Bush administration's actions.
But I think there's a lot more to what has happened that we'll find out, that we'll find out more than we found out in most scandals the last five years.
Well, I sure hope so.
And, you know, I noticed that you picked up on the same National Journal story that I did by Murray Was about how when Bush quashed the NSA investigation, which is its own interesting story, he denied the security clearance required for the Justice Department investigators to actually do their job.
But Murray Was, if I got it right, reported that Gonzalez recommended that course of action to George Bush right after he found out that he was going to be a subject of the investigation since he was White House counsel when they started the NSA program.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's dead on.
So that's basic obstruction of justice right there.
That's a felony, isn't it?
Well, and it's so simple that even a conservative can understand it.
It's so simple that someone who watches Fox News could understand it.
Oh, no, that easy, huh?
Well, yeah.
And Murray Was is one of the best investigative journalists in D.C.
He was the person who broke a lot of the story of Plaingate, and he was, you know, always about three steps ahead of everybody else.
And it was his story in the National Journal, I guess a week or so ago, that talked about how this issue of Gonzalez basically getting Bush to deep-six the investigation at the point of Gonzalez.
This is, you know, this is something that's going to be far more difficult for the Bush supporters and the Bush media to rush aside.
It's interesting to think back.
Last year, Bush was pushing two big pieces to kind of whitewash his record.
One was the Military Commissions Act, which was basically retroactively legalized torture, as Bush defined it or didn't define it.
And then there was the various bills to whitewash the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretaps on American citizens.
Bush got the torture bill.
Bush did not get the bill to make legal the crimes that have occurred over the last five years of wiretapping.
This is something which could explode like a mushroom cloud at any time, because I think there's documents, there's perhaps memos, perhaps e-mail, that that came forward.
And if we see how many high-ranking Justice Department officials, NSA officials, and others recognize that this was criminal behavior on behalf of the Bush administration and the Bush type still did it, that's going to put them in a very hard position.
Absolutely.
And even just on the obstruction, if I remember correctly, one of the counts against Bill Clinton in his articles of impeachment was obstruction of justice for trying to get Monica Lewinsky a job.
So if George Bush is denying security clearance to Justice Department investigators, he's just as guilty of obstruction there as Gonzalez, right?
Well, and, you know, it's a little bit more potent, because one other danger that the administration is facing here is, you know, there are a lot of different investigations going on right now, including some internal ones by some of the inspector generals who are credible.
As time goes on, Americans are probably going to learn how a lot more Americans have been targeted by these, by this warrantless spying, by other federal violations of law.
And at some point, the folks have been apathetic on that so far, but if that apathy ends, you know, there could be a heck of a backlash.
Yeah.
But I've been saying that for a few years, and it ain't happened yet, by and large.
Well, and you've been specific lately, too.
You've talked about this.
Well, I haven't given up on that.
Well, this FBI agent at Guantanamo Bay, right, was told that there was a secret executive order that legalized the torture.
Yes, I think you're right on that.
There was also the FBI on-scene commander in Baghdad who sent an email in May of 2004 that he was told there was a secret presidential executive order which permitted extreme interrogation techniques that the FBI considered illegal.
That may be what I'm thinking of from Iraq.
But I think that there may have been some stuff from that from Guantanamo as well, because some of the FBI agents there were horrified to see what they considered to be torture.
Well, now, but this has all been retroactively legalized, right?
You know, the law last year, the military commissions act, which was a, you know, one more hallmark in the American struggle to bring freedom to the world, that would cover some of that or would try to cover some of that.
But it's also retroactive decriminalization of torture.
I don't know how well that's going to stand up in the courts if there's a serious challenge and even more if there are some leaks or some exposures of what Bush and his team knew and when they knew it.
Because the, is it the Patrick Coburn book on Rumsfeld?
Yeah, which I have it right here.
I'm on chapter two.
It's excellent.
Okay.
I haven't read the book, but I've heard it's great.
And I read that he talks about how Rumsfeld was very deeply involved in the torture techniques for individual detainees.
Right.
Wasn't there, I remember a salon story about Rumsfeld personally overseeing the torture of one of the four or five 20th hijackers.
Yes, that's a nice way of putting it.
Yeah, that sounds very credible.
I think Seymour Hersh has commented that Bush was much more involved in the torture processes than people realize.
I'm not sure if I'm quoting Hersh right on that and I'm not exactly sure what he meant, but there again, if some of this stuff comes out, you know, something which struck me, you know, talking about the other things that Bush folks might want to, that they need to be worried about is something that Senator Leahy is on right now.
Is this secret presidential authorization to use extreme interrogation techniques signed by George Bush?
The feds have basically admitted that this exists, but they've avoided having to disclose it yet.
So apparently Leahy isn't worried that it's all retroactively legal now.
No, Senator Leahy has done a great job.
Senator Leahy has done a great job on a number of areas.
I mean, I'm sure there's, I'm not following him closely.
I'm sure there's a lot of things he's doing that would mortify me, but, and vice versa, but he is digging on a number of things.
And he is one of the intelligent focused people on the Hill who can actually do a good investigation.
All right.
Now, well, by the way, this is Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm speaking with James Bovard.
I appreciate you not getting drunk until later in the day, Jim.
Well, I'm sitting here towing a cigar and puffing away.
All right.
Well, here's some more crimes that were committed and never really investigated.
In fact, there are stories in UPI about how the FBI started to investigate some of this stuff, but apparently never did finish up.
And that would be the Niger uranium forgeries.
Who gave the classified information about America's breaking of Iran's codes to their spy, Ahmed Chalabi?
Whether or not it is true, as Robert Dreyfus and Julian Borger report that the Israelis were manufacturing fake intelligence in English to help lie us into war and by what channels that intelligence was being introduced into the stream in the run up to war in 2002.
These are some very serious questions, I think, regarding the run up to war.
Philip Giraldi in a recent article pointed out that in his view, what Douglas Fyfe and the boys were doing in the Office of Special Plans were war crimes.
It's illegal to manufacture a case for war.
Yeah, but I guess that the FBI has been very busy with some of the outstanding investigations trying to make sure that the porn video makers have all the birthdays of the actresses.
Yeah, and pay all their taxes on time.
There you go.
There you go.
Well, that's a heck of a lot more important than lying the nation into war.
Yeah, there are a lot of things here.
Part of the reason why I think Bush is in a lot more trouble than most people recognize is there are so many abuses like this, like the lies that led to the war with Iraq, the lies and the abuses that carried on the torture scandal, a lot of these other areas of the spying on American citizens.
Well, these things might look like they're separate scandals, but once they start exploding like mushroom clouds, more and more people are going to come out of the woodwork and decide that they had better fess up or that they've got something people should know as well.
Government officials are starting to lose their fear of the White House, and that's really bad news for Bush after how he's governed for five years.
Yeah, well, come on, whistleblowers.
We need you.
There's only one good kind of rat.
That's a government employee who turns on their boss.
Let's hear it.
Okay, you and Gordon Liddy.
Now, yeah, well, Gordon Liddy is, I guess, famous for keeping his mouth shut, right?
Yeah, he was.
He's a fascinating study.
It's funny.
I wonder if we took a tape recorder back to the 1990s and got some good clips of his radio show and play them back now, you know, in different contexts.
I wonder whether he would condemn 1990s G. Gordon Liddy for being so anti-government.
Well, yeah, it's funny.
He was a big fan of lost rights.
He was the he was a radio host who did who did the most to push it early on.
He was more lost rights.
The wonderful book by James Bovard.
Yeah, thanks.
Came out in 1994.
Gordon Liddy was gung ho.
And he's always been a fanatical supporter of the Second Amendment.
And that's all to his credit.
I mean, I don't know what's happened in the last five or six years, but, you know, he was he was stalwart.
And he was also had a different tone than Rush Limbaugh had back in the mid 90s.
I mean, he was yeah, didn't didn't have the kind of swarmy beltway insider or the friends of the, you know, ruling elite.
Yeah, he was more of a mccainiac than a Bush guy, I guess.
I don't know that he was a McCain supporter, was he?
Yeah.
Well, if I remember.
Yeah.
During the primaries.
OK.
Yeah.
I think it's just a war veteran thing rather than anything really personal.
But OK.
Anyway, enough of Liddy.
What a waste of a radio show.
Let's talk about sovereign immunity.
There was a case last week where these people tried to sue Donald Rumsfeld for being a torturer.
And the judge apparently was was quite broken up about it and quite conflicted about it and said, you know, I really like this case to continue.
But if I let you sue Donald Rumsfeld personally for torture, then, wow, that would just completely open up the floodgates.
So even though it seems like that's consistent with the law, I can't imagine what a giant policy change that would be.
And I'm just a judge and not fit to make it.
So I'm going to rule that Donald Rumsfeld has sovereign immunity and that you can sue the secretary of defense, but you can't sue Donald Rumsfeld.
Well, it's curious that Rumsfeld would have sovereign immunity after he's left office.
I mean, that's the same thing that Pinochet thought he had.
You know, it's interesting to hear Bush and a lot of other B.C. bigwigs, they love to invoke the rule of law.
But what Americans don't realize is that there is an asterisk, that the government is largely exempt from the law.
And we have seen that with so many scandals in the last five years.
We've seen it with the FBI.
I mean, it's fascinating to me that the last month there have been a lot of exposés on how the FBI has told so many, made so many false statements using these national security letters and threatening businesses to force them to turn over data and claiming to have links to investigations that didn't exist.
And everybody in D.C., everybody, almost everybody in Congress, talks about these as if they were harmless errors, innocent mistakes, so on and so forth.
If an average citizen made those kind of false statements to a federal official, he'd be looking in prison.
But you have this systemic lying by the FBI and it's a non-issue.
Maybe if some of those national security letters had been used against U.S. attorneys, then it would be a big deal, right?
If the national security letters have been used against the Democratic National Committee, people in D.C. might pay attention to it, seriously.
But if it's only being used against folks like you or I or some of the folks in small towns who have a library, run a library, I mean, you know, it's kind of like, well, that's interesting, but let's, you know, let's keep an eye on the big picture, and that is the FBI is the savior of our liberty, and J. Edgar Hoover said so, and nothing's changed since then or else.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, something- Well, wait, hang on one second.
What exactly is a national security letter, for those in the audience who are not familiar with this jargon?
Okay, a national security letter is a subpoena, which the FBI can issue on its own authority.
My understanding is that it's not even being run from headquarters, but it's being issued by the district offices, and what happens is that a person who receives that letter is automatically muzzled, that the person can be sent to prison for years if they ever disclose that they have been hit by one of these letters, and they are compelled to turn over basically any data that the FBI demands.
So this is one cop asks another cop for a warrant, and nobody has to go talk to an independent judge first, like it is described in the Fourth Amendment.
Yeah, I mean, and from some of the inspector general reports, it may not be the cops even bother asking each other, that they just send out the letters and claim that there is an investigation going on even when there isn't, and this compels the surrender of data then, but as you said, this is a total travesty of the Fourth Amendment.
The Fourth Amendment says that the government needs a warrant and reasonable suspicion to, you know, seize this private information.
The feds are issuing over 30,000 of these national security letters a year.
It's just a massive trampling of the Bill of Rights, and it's interesting to see how cowardly most of the news media has been on this.
There was an excellent Washington Post story in late 2005, I think by Barton Gellman.
Otherwise, the media has been pretty quiet on this.
There was a story, an op-ed I did on it in early 2006, and I was household to a bunch of different op-ed editors, and it seemed like the story might as well have been radioactive because almost nobody would touch it.
It was as if, well, you know, I don't know why the editors were so leery of criticizing the FBI, but certainly since then, there's a lot more evidence out there, but still, the FBI is largely getting a pass on this.
Yeah, along with the rest of the government.
In fact, last night I was looking through your blog, and you had a link to that great piece by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
Yes.
Where they went through the whole run-up to war from late summer, I guess beginning in August 2002, through the first month or so of the war.
And I remember pretty well 2002, and because I read Antiwar.com every day, I noticed when the Washington Post originally debunked the aluminum tube story in September of 2002.
You know, but just to go through and just read, not only the lies, but just the, I'm looking for the word, the submissive posture of the media where, you know, James Bovard, how dare you come on here and say that the Bush administration might not be right.
You are a defender of Saddam Hussein.
You're taking Saddam's side against your own country for the slightest disagreement, for even trying to have the slightest little debate.
And aluminum tubes, yeah, who cares if the Washington Post debunked that back in September.
We're just going to keep saying it over and over and over and over again.
Every channel, every paper, nobody gets a pass.
And these people are all still our media gods.
These are the same people on TV, the same people in the paper.
None of these writers have hung themselves, none of them have, you know, come out and written, you know, massive mea culpas begging forgiveness for getting, you know, nearly 700,000 people killed over nothing.
None of it.
I mean, and we just go on as though, you know, oh, good, Katie Couric's on.
What's she going to tell us about what happened in the world today?
Well, Scott, I'm just glad this hasn't made you cynical.
Ah, you should, I was like this, you know, in the 1990s, man.
I mean, the level I'm on now, I don't know if I'll ever be able to come back down from here.
Well, it's just, I mean, it's an excellent point you make about how the Washington Post did have an exposé on that quite a while before the war started.
And I've seen that in so many other areas of what's happened in the war and terrorism at home.
There are individual articles, or sometimes only on the web, which exposed how the government has lied or how some program is abusing Americans' rights and liberties.
And it is one blip on the radar screen, and then it is as if almost the entire media goes back to the already scheduled propaganda.
And, well, thank goodness for the government and George Bush said today, and here's a picture of John Ashcroft praising the Patriot Act.
And it's amazing how much BS the media lets the government still get away with on a daily basis.
Yeah.
And even on the most basic stuff like, well, we're not going to let you take pictures of the coffins coming home at Dover, even though that's called the Dover test.
That's, you know, been the American tradition is you always let the press take pictures of the coffins so that the American people know what they're really dealing with.
And they said, oh, well, you know, we're not going to let you take pictures of the coffins anymore because that might hurt the feelings of the family.
When, you know, how's that for an outright lie?
We know good and well why they don't want pictures of the coffins taken.
Well, you know, it's a fascinating thing about the national psychology and the political psychology of the last five years.
It was interesting to see how many lies Bill Clinton got away with and how brazen some of those lies were.
I mean, a single example was the final FBI assault at Waco when the FBI was broadcasting as the tanks went crashing in.
This is not an assault.
And yet it's as if that same mentality, that same level of extreme mendacity has been used for five years, and it's largely worked until recently.
And it's interesting to think if things were not going to hell in a handbasket in Iraq, Bush would probably still be on a pedestal, a lot more of a pedestal for more Americans, and far fewer people would be recognizing that the government is lying on a lot of different issues.
Right.
And you know, it's funny, too, especially from the conservatives who in the 1990s, many of them would say, look, you know, I don't really care if the guy's cheating on his wife, but the thing is he lied in this civil lawsuit, and that's a crime.
And then he went before this grand jury and told lies to them, too.
And that's an even bigger crime.
And he obstructed justice.
And these are crimes, and it doesn't matter what the underlying issue is, it's important whether the president's telling the truth or not, particularly in regards to, you know, his dealings with the judicial branch.
And, you know, we just can't have this.
You know, they didn't really mind so much when they burned Waco.
But the lies about Monica Lewinsky, that was enough to impeach the president of the United States.
And yet, as you say, right now the only reason anybody's against the war really is because we lost it.
Well, no, I mean, I wouldn't say anybody on that.
But, I mean, it's, you know, because there have been a lot of people that have been principled opponents, you know, since Bush started being the war drums in 2002.
I mean, the folks at antiwar.com, the folks that follow Future Freedom Foundation, Nation Magazine, pretty much.
Counterpunch.
Counterpunch has done wonderful work.
But, you know, going back to the thing about Clinton lying in the grand jury, a single example of a Bush lie was his statement to Congress, I believe March 18th or 19th, 2003, in which he justified the invading Iraq by the authorization to use military force that Congress passed around September 18th, 2001.
And Bush basically explicitly linked the invasion of Iraq to 9-11.
And at that point, Bush knew there was not evidence to make that link.
And so that was open fraud and, you know, for an act of war.
If that is not culpable, if Bush is legally immune for that, then, you know, at least stop telling us this BS about rule of law.
Right.
Yeah, let's go ahead and just be honest about it, if that's going to be the way it is.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it would be painful to hear, but at least people would not have to feel like fools when they hear the U.S. president talking about how much he cares about liberty and freedom.
Because that's something, you know, there again, I mean, this is a measure of how far that Bush, Rove, and others think Americans are gullible.
I went back and reread Bush's second inaugural speech from January 2005 recently.
And it's nothing but gushing about freedom and liberty and spreading democracy around the world.
And it was utter crap at that point.
And yet almost all the Washington media just kind of, you know, jumped up and was howling and praising him.
And he's such an idealist.
I mean, it was crap.
It was crap then, it's crap now.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's the most obvious crap, too.
I think you'd have to have been a little kid at the time or just, you know, out of the country or not paying attention at all to not remember that it was kind of a shock and a surprise that as soon as the war started, they dropped the weapons of mass destruction as best they could anyway, the White House did, and went straight for the purpose of this mission is to liberate the people of Iraq, which they had basically made clear throughout the second half of 2002 and the beginning of 2003 that, well, look, we're doing this regime change to protect America.
And, you know, the Iraqi people will be better off in the long run or whatever.
But this isn't about them.
This is about protecting America from these terrible weapons.
And, you know, the Iraqi people, let's just hope that they don't resist too much when we come in to do our regime change.
And then all of a sudden it's about creating modernity and democracy in the Middle East and the new domino theory with us as the Reds and all that.
It was tripe from the very get-go.
I mean, who could not remember that?
Most Americans.
I mean, but the Washington press corps anyway.
Yeah, but part of the reason that most Americans don't recall is because it's something that the vast majority of the Washington press corps was, you know, marching lockstep behind Bush, praising his every announcement.
Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post, who's done some excellent work on the war in Iraq and did a fine book on it, said about a year later that he would try to, that editors of the Washington Post simply did not want to run articles that were critical of the move to war because they figured it was a done deal.
So why bother criticizing?
And this is the same mentality that still permeates Washington.
Sure.
And you know what?
This is one that I like to bring up because it's usually kind of off to the side, and that is the North Korea issue.
George Bush and his State Department lackeys took office accusing North Korea of having a secret uranium enrichment program, that they were violating the agreed framework deal that had been made with the Clinton team.
And so Bush then unilaterally abrogated the so-called agreed framework deal with North Korea.
And in response, they left the IAEA or they left the NPT, they kicked out all the IAEA inspectors and they started harvesting plutonium, not enriching uranium, harvesting plutonium, and actually succeeded in making half a dozen or so nuclear bombs.
And now finally, Bush has capitulated and given them even more welfare than Clinton was giving them in order to get the deal back.
But that was the kind of thing where there was, you know, provoking at least raising the risk of war on the Korean Peninsula quite a bit over the last few years, all over pure lies, Jim, based on no facts whatsoever.
Well, yeah, but it made some very good applause lines in George Bush's speeches.
Yeah, exactly.
It's, you know, it's fascinating how there is this macho mindset by so many people in the Bush administration and so many of these Beltway commentators, folks who never fired a gun in anger, folks who are probably frightened of guns, many of them, and yet they're just out there gung-ho for, you know, sending in the U.S. military and teaching foreigners a lesson.
And, you know, it's ugly.
It's ugly.
Well, if I can get you to stay on the line for just a couple of few more minutes, Jim, I was thinking maybe we could just try to go off the top of our heads here.
And I admit I have a little cheat sheet, but maybe we could just go through some of the lies of the Bush administration.
We covered all their criminal activity pretty well, I think.
But there's some of the lies that go along with that that probably most people have forgotten.
And I'd like to take the time to remind them if it's OK with you.
Fire away.
Well, I went through Colin Powell's speech and saw where he was he was threatening us with camel pox.
And I thought camel pox?
What's that?
It sounds like chicken pox, only Arab and scary.
And yeah, plague.
Oh, Saddam Hussein, he's got the plague.
He's going to use that on us.
Typhus, tetanus, cholera, hemorrhagic fever.
He's got two different kinds of sarin.
He's got VX, mustard gas, anthrax storehouses full of it.
George Bush promised in his Cincinnati speech, mobile biological weapons laboratories that can drive around and make germ weapons on the fly.
And then, of course, the remote control planes that can fly from, I guess, Baghdad across the Western Desert, across Jordan, Israel, the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean to spray the eastern seaboard with those germ weapons.
Those are some really, really powerful remote control planes Saddam Hussein's got there.
And one of the biggest ones was Cheney invoking Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's son in law, who had defected in 1995, who was in charge of the weapons of mass destruction programs and explained quite clearly that he had destroyed every last bit of it in 1991.
Although admittedly, toward the end of 91, they had tried to hide some weapons for a short time.
Well, Cheney went in front of the veterans of foreign wars.
He went in front of the VFW and said, hey, listen, Saddam Hussein's son in law admitted that they kept weapons of mass destruction after the Gulf War and left out the part about, yeah, but had destroyed every last drop by December.
And, you know, the kind of content that that shows for American veterans, you know, these are the guys who fought in World War Two and Korea and Vietnam, the guys who are sending their sons and grandsons to Iraq on Cheney's word.
And he's looking them right in the face and telling just a bold face lie, just right to their face about the information from Hussein Kamel.
And that was one that just I remember at the time, you know, being outraged at that because I already remember the Hussein Kamel story from before.
But then you have the aluminum tubes and the niger uranium, which ought to count as, you know, five dozen lies because they just told them over and over and over again to make us believe that they had a nuclear weapons program there in Iraq.
You had the they lied about the Medicare, the cost of the prescription pills, learned all about that in The Bush Betrayal, your book.
Also, the No Child Left Behind stuff is just I mean, you want frustration.
Just read the No Child Left Behind section of The Bush Betrayal, people.
Jose Padilla, they said, was going to set off a dirty bomb, even though now they admit that that was, you know, made up.
Well, you know, there's there's a simple rule of thumb to keep in mind.
And shortly after his first inauguration, George Bush joked to a crowd of Washington insiders.
He said, you can fool some of the people all the time and those are the ones you need to concentrate on.
Yep.
And this is this is what they have done.
I mean, you know, somewhat somewhat to their credit, these folks have been honest about their lying every now and then.
The Downing Street memo, I mean, that was, you know, they were obviously going to stay and do do whatever necessary to gin up the case for war.
Yeah, including deliberately getting one of their own planes shot down.
Yeah.
And the thing that I think that's interesting is that, you know, you know, Bush's lies about Rumsfeld job security just before the 2006 congressional election.
And then the day afterwards, he's fired.
And Bush explains it, well, you know, I you know, I had to say that or else people would think, you know, I forgot the exact word.
But in his press conference after the GOP lost Congress, he was blunt about it.
He felt like, you know, well, of course I lied.
Right.
And but but the thing that perplexes me here is that, OK, Bush has admitted that he lied a number of times.
And yet George Bush gives his search speech in early January this year.
And he's treated, portrayed by the media as if he's an honest man making a case, an honest case for a buildup in Iraq.
Yeah.
Every day is a new day.
You know, it's sort of like a salamander that that keeps growing a new tail.
Yeah.
That's how the media treats lying politicians.
That's a good analogy that that's really what it is.
I mean, oh, and, you know, I left off when I was ranting down my list there.
Really?
Yeah.
Zarqawi.
That Zarqawi was somehow the bridge between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, which was a pure lie.
Well, and something else which which Bush did, you know, throughout 2002, Bush talked about how how the passengers on Flight 93 crashed that took control and crashed the plane in the ground in western Pennsylvania because they love freedom and democracy so much that they want to commit suicide to save Washington.
And, you know, there was never any evidence from that.
And the the tapes that the FBI has disclosed never support that.
And there are there are other questions about Flight 93, but we don't need to go into them here, I reckon.
Well, I mean, for the most part, basically, it was pretty clear that the the hijackers themselves ditched the plane, right?
Yeah.
That was the government's latest story.
The government, you know, on so many things, the 9-11 government has changed its story.
And yet each time the government announces the new and final truth, everybody is obliged to accept it.
So, well, that's definitely true.
And it's the kind of thing, too, which, you know, as long as you brought it up, I'd kind of like to complain because I want to see a real investigation as opposed to the 9-11 Blue Ribbon Commission whitewash.
Yes.
I mean, it was and there were so many noises that those that those 9-11 commissioners made that it was obvious that they were basically started out with knee pads and did a lot of boot licking.
And I think back to the terms that the 9-11 commissioners agreed to for interviewing Bush and chaining the White House, that it was that was no transcript, was not under oath.
It was all like some big fest of politicians.
Some of them said afterwards that it was a jovial atmosphere.
You know, Bush bears quite a bit of the responsibility for the failure to stop that attack.
And yet you have these 9-11 commissioners who are, you know, who are bowled over about like, well, I was in the Oval Office, you know.
I wonder if George Bush gave them a pin for their fancy shirts.
You know, I was in the Oval Office, you know.
Yeah, well, and and the funny thing about that commission, too, was it was purely outcome based from the beginning.
And I have to get based.
Boy, that's a euphemism.
Well, I mean, they said, look, the purpose of this commission is to recommend to us new laws that we can pass and new powers that we can grant to ourselves, period.
And they said that from the get go, introducing Henry Kissinger to run the damn thing.
Oh, yeah.
You know, it was interesting.
I was I was traveling in November 2002 and I was out of touch for a couple of days.
And prior to that, there have been rumors about how Kissinger was could be in trouble, in trouble as far as being indicted for war crimes.
And I was driving up Interstate 81, Virginia, and just stopped at the gas station to refill and kind of walked in there.
And by chance, they had a New York Times there in the newsstand and had a big picture of Kissinger there above the fold.
And I said, he's been indicted for war crimes.
And I walked over and I saw the headline Kissinger chosen.
They had a 9-11 commission.
I said, oh, bad day, bad day.
Yeah.
Well, you know, just the I think it was the Sunday before September 11th.
Two days later, 60 Minutes had done a piece about what a terrorist Henry Kissinger was.
And then by Tuesday night, he was everybody's terrorism expert on TV.
Well, and something something which I find perplexing, a part of the reason that that Henry Kissinger dropped resigned as the as the nominee for the chairmanship of the 9-11 commission is that he would not not not he would not reveal his list of foreign clients.
But that's apparently no impediment for The Washington Post editorial page, because Kissinger still runs these huge, unreadable screeds there that they get published and we have no idea who's paying them.
That's not a trouble for The Washington Post, but The Washington Post editorial page still insists that Bush didn't lie in the war.
So those folks have been in Washington too long.
Yeah.
Now, another thing about the 9-11 investigation is that there's so much ridiculous kukri out there.
South Park did a great thing, making fun of the some of the conspiracy theory stuff.
And the thing is, like, you know, at the very least, we have some serious criminally negligent homicide here.
There ought to be indictments.
There ought to be people at the very least being fired en masse for their failures that day.
And responsibility does go to the top.
But when you when you have all this missile hit the Pentagon and bombs in the towers and everything, the water is so muddy that to call for a real investigation is to add to that chorus at this point.
Yeah, it is frustrating.
It is frustrating that, you know, it is frustrating that some folks who didn't get their rabies shots seem to seem to dominate this issue.
But I mean, there are so many lies that the government has told and has basically admitted so far.
And we're we are perhaps a little bit closer to the truth than we were in October 2001.
But there's still so much out there that the government will keep the lid on.
And that's again, that's part of the reason why I'm hopeful that as that as the Bush administration continues to break up, that we'll learn some things about what the government has done both before 9-11 and afterwards, because it's possible that the torture scandal is only the tip of the iceberg of government abuses.
Yeah, well, and I really think that's true.
And you look at their record in their terrorism prosecutions post 9-11.
They haven't prosecuted a single real terrorist, except, I guess, Moussaoui.
The rest of these have been, you know, complete farces.
Detroit, Virginia paintball guys.
The Lackawanna six, the father and son in Lodi, California, the poor kid in Brooklyn, who's supposed who's going to blow up the subway station.
I mean, it's so much just outright lies there.
I can't imagine how bad it really is once the secret papers start getting leaked.
You know what we're going to find out.
If they do get leaked.
I mean, you know, it is one of the biggest fallacies out there that that truth will eventually out because in government it doesn't.
It usually doesn't.
Most government cover up succeed.
And most of the Bush cover ups have succeeded so far.
That's true.
All right.
Well, let me ask you one more question before I let you off the line here.
James Bovard, author of Attention Deficit Democracy.
We've been talking about some pretty serious stuff here.
War, torture, the end of the Bill of Rights in many ways, it seems like.
And I know that you've been keeping track of this government from a very pro freedom libertarian perspective for a long time, long before George Bush and the Bush doctrine.
So I wonder whether you think that the last few years experience here amounts to a real sea change in American society, you know, over the long term, or whether this is just another chapter in the same old empire we've had since World War Two or what?
I think there's probably a sea change.
It's for a number of reasons.
I mean, if you think back five and a half years ago, who would think that the torture would become the law of the land?
Who would think that the that the government would be able to basically given a blank check to suspend habeas corpus?
Some of the other stuff that they've done that the people haven't really looked at that much so far, the provision in the Defense Authorization Act last year that allows, that makes it far easier for the president to declare a martial law and send in U.S. troops or to send National Guard wherever he pleases to, you know, to supposedly reimpose public order.
But, you know, I started to think how Bush and Cheney would define that.
There are other policies that the government has gotten away with.
I have been surprised at how much the government has been able to get away with and how little fundamental concern there is about the trampling of the Bill of Rights and any sense of limits on government.
And I've been surprised at how enthusiastic conservatives have been for a president who acts like he's an absolute king.
And I've been disappointed how many libertarians have just kind of shrugged their shoulders and kind of, you know, I've been surprised at how many Beltway libertarians have been more concerned about, dammit, what's the name of that act in 2002, which put the regulations on business?
The Oxley something?
The Sarbanes-Oxley.
It seems that many of the Beltway libertarians have been far more concerned about Sarbanes-Oxley and its impact on corporate profits than they have been about Military Commissions Act legalizing torture.
Right, exactly.
And, you know, these are folks who I thought would have been far more outspoken and far more concerned about these power grabs.
And by and large, it hasn't happened.
Certainly, there are websites like Antiwar, Future Freedom Foundation, the Independent Institute have done some fine work on this.
Rockwell has.
But by and large, it's been the left wing that has done a very far more effective job of rallying people and protesting against these profound abuses of power.
And, you know, I really appreciate you calling out the War Party libertarians.
They deserve to be called out and they deserve to be shamed, not just for their support of the war in the first place, but as you point out, they're silent since.
If the libertarian movement is not the forefront of opposing American empire and Leviathan and we have to leave it to the radical left, well, guess what?
We're not going to have freedom.
And it's one thing to be kind of muzzled or to be soft-spoken or to be, you know, misguided on the war.
That's a bad thing.
But, you know, torture should not be a great area for libertarians.
And I was surprised at how little vigorous opposition that there was from some of the mainstream libertarians on the Military Commissions Act.
But, you know, it's hard to imagine a more brazen assault on any concept of limited government.
And yet, you know, it didn't get that much attention from folks I thought would have known better.
Yeah, well, maybe you just missed that part in the Constitution where it gives the Commander in Chief the override power where all the rest of the Constitution ceases to exist when he's called into the actual service of the United States.
Well, you know, but the important thing is that corporate profits are doing pretty well.
Yeah, and particularly CEO pay compared to people who work for them.
Yeah, and it's, you know, there again, this is something which I've seen to see which libertarian groups did more to stand up for CEO pay than they did to protest torture.
It has been frustrating that folks who understood the danger of government to your right, the danger of arbitrary power to gun owners seem to be oblivious to the danger of government power for everything else.
Right.
And not all of them are that way.
There are some that have made the connection, but by and large, you know, I shake my head ruefully.
Yeah, well, wait, we can end with good news on that note, and that is Bob Barr, who was always my favorite conservative in the House of Representatives, who the Libertarian Party chose to help destroy in 2002, right.
But I just saw the headline yesterday.
He is now the new lobbyist for the Marijuana Policy Project.
Oh, really?
Yeah, how do you like that for a realignment?
Barr is doing some excellent work, and I think back to...
I like that guy, man.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting.
The first time I noticed Barr was in the House hearings on Waco in July 2005.
Right.
Barr did a great job.
Barr smacked around some of the federal witnesses that were dodging and lying, and he was concentrated, and I saw that in Barr in hearings throughout the late 1990s.
He was someone who paid attention, he got it, and he's done excellent work in recent years exposing the danger of government power.
Yeah, absolutely, and you know, you may remember that Washington, D.C. held a vote on legalizing medical marijuana, and he obstructed, when he was in Congress, he obstructed the funds to even count the votes that had already been cast.
And so, for him to come around on the marijuana issue, and again, it's not that Bob Barr is a pot smoker now, it's...
Well, basically what he's done is he's applied the lesson that you just talked about.
If arbitrary government power is not okay on the gun issue, maybe it's not on the pot issue either.
And he's finally got his head around that and understood that liberty is liberty, even if it's not the thing that you're into.
Well, Barr's made great progress, and I hope his progress is contagious to other conservatives.
Yeah, he does, he sets a good example, as do you.
James Bovard, he's the author of The Farm Fiasco, The Fair Trade Fraud, Freedom in Chains, Feeling Your Pain, Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, Attention Deficit Democracy, and I'm sure I left off a few more of those, right?
Fair enough.
It's a long list, what the hell.
Hey, I mean, this guy Bovard is a great writer, run out and get Attention Deficit Democracy, it's a great lead, and it's really funny, and you're great, just like always, thanks, Jen Bovard.
Hey Scott, thanks for having me on, it was fun to chat.
