04/24/07 – James Bovard – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Radio Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and introducing my next guest, the great libertarian writer James Bovard.
Welcome back, James.
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me back on the program.
Oh, well, it's always great to talk to you, my friend.
And just for folks who don't know about Jim Bovard, he's a policy advisor to the Future Freedom Foundation, and he's the author of Shakedown, Farm Fiasco, Fair Trade Fraud, Freedom in Chains, Lost Rights, Feeling Your Pain, Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, and Attention Deficit Democracy.
And I'm proud to say he also blogs for us from time to time at antiwar.com.
And Jim, you have this very disturbing article here in the brand new edition of the American Conservative magazine.
I've been trying like mad to get somebody on the show to talk about this issue.
I couldn't get anybody from Congressional Quarterly to call me back.
And so here we go, my good friend, Jim Bovard, is the one who covered the story.
So...
And it wasn't possible, and the folks in the White House would be on the show on this one?
No, you know, I invited them on and they wouldn't talk about it.
How about the Pentagon?
Did you check with them?
I even, I tried the Governor's Association, I'm trying to get their spokesman on.
Interesting.
Okay, yeah, the Governor's spokesman showed some gumption on this briefly, at least.
Yeah, well, not on my show, he didn't.
Okay, so here's the problem, right?
Last fall, September, they passed the Military Commissions Act, and just a couple of days later, I guess, they passed the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act, the appropriations bill, right, $500 billion for the Department of Defense.
And attached to that was what Garrett calls a revolution within the form.
And now the President has absolute control over the National Guard at his whim, is that right?
Well, I wouldn't say it's absolute, but Congress made it far easier for the President to declare a martial law and to seize direct control over the state's National Guard and to send one state's National Guard to suppress people in other states, which is not really what the Founding Fathers had in mind.
And it was fast, this is a great example of how neither major party in D.C. gives a damn about avoiding dictatorship, because there were warnings about this.
Some people talked about how this was just stuck in the bill at the last minute.
That wasn't the case.
But Senator Leahy, of all people, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee was vehemently opposed to this and warned again and again about how this would raise the danger of martial law.
The National Governors Association, as you mentioned, were in the forefront of opposition to this, but nobody else in Capitol Hill seemed to pay attention or care about this.
And now, this is a major change, isn't it the case that historically, since the National Guard units were created in the 30s, that the deal always was that the President has to ask the Governors for permission for them to turn over their Guard units to him or something, right?
Well, I'm not well informed of the history of the Evolution National Guard, and certainly it's been profoundly corrupted over recent decades, and especially under George Bush, with the Guard units being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan.
But this is a quantum leap, because it's much more of a push-button martial law.
The Congress back in 1807 passed something called the Insurrection Act, and that put severe limits on the President's ability to deploy the military here within the U.S.
The Pasa Comitatus Act of 1878 tightened those restrictions, in part because of the gross abuses and atrocities committed by the Northern Army in the Southern states after the Civil War.
Americans back then had seen what happened when the U.S. military was involved in so-called law enforcement, the law was the first thing to get put down the crapper.
And so there was an effort to put severe limits on this.
But Pasa Comitatus has been eaten away year by year, the Bush folks have shown utter contempt for it, and now Congress, in spite of so many of the violations of Pasa Comitatus the Bush folks have already done, Congress apparently did not think twice about making it much easier for Bush to use far more military force here at home against Americans.
And again, it comes on the heels of a major government failure, this is all in the name of preventing another Hurricane Katrina.
Well, that was the pretext, that was the pretext.
I think the Bush folks were fishing for ways to get around this law long before that hurricane hit New Orleans.
That's a typical thing of the politicians, just kind of lurking, almost like some kind of dirty old man hanging around by the school playground, just waiting for an incident which he can exploit.
And the hurricane Katrina did this, Bush floated the idea of radically changing Pasa Comitatus and other restrictions on the military used after Katrina, he did not get much support on that, but, you know, they kept pushing and kept pushing, and then late last September they just eased this into law, and I think the vote was 100 to nothing in the Senate on this.
So, ugly business.
Yeah, and the media just completely fell down on the job, I didn't find out about this until it was months later when Congressional Quarterly reported about it.
Yeah, there were a couple of bloggers that did some good work on this in October of last year after it passed.
There were a couple of local papers scattered around the country that raised questions about letting the feds control the National Guard.
Those tend to be papers in states that had, you know, hurricanes and things like that and were understandably concerned about letting the feds pull their folks away.
But as far as any concern about the principle involved here, about the danger of martial law, it was ignored, even though Senator Leahy was very explicit on this.
I mean, Leahy declared on September 19th last year that we certainly do not need to make it easier for presidents to declare martial law.
He said ten days later, using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy.
And he was, you know, he was hitting the principle issue beautifully, but, you know, nobody cared.
And now I want to try to get to exactly, you know, what the change is.
I know that after September 11th, the president did not, you know, put out an order for the National Guard units to deploy to the airports.
He asked the governors, would you please deploy your National Guard units to the airports and retain control of them yourselves?
And I guess basically now he wouldn't have to ask them.
He could just go ahead and take control of their Guard units, even if they didn't want them to.
I think you're right.
And it's interesting.
You know, the use of the National Guard after 9-11 is a symbol of how it's become pretty much of a sop for the American people.
A number of the airports, I believe in Philadelphia, maybe New Jersey as well, they had Guard units there walking around with M-16s, but the Guards were not allowed to have them loaded.
I was in Penn Station a few weeks ago and noticed there was a number of National Guard folks there, and there was one guy in full uniform who was kind of strutting around, and I noticed he had a giant canteen sitting on his hip.
And I was thinking, you know, there's about 150 fast food places here where you can buy a Coke for 99 cents or a little bit more, and here's the deal with the giant canteen.
But you know, it's like I was about the only person laughing at him, and that's sad.
Right.
Yeah, that's how I felt at the airport shortly after September 11th.
I took a trip, and yeah, it seemed like I was the only one who resented the fact that, you know, I was surrounded by military guys with machine guns.
Everybody else was looking around going, oh, I feel so much safer, as though, you know, the Afghanistan special forces had infiltrated every airport in the land.
It sounds like you didn't have your Uzi with you that day.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well.
I should have brought it.
Should have brought it.
Well, you know, I mean, with the new carry-on regs, they're really hard to slip through.
Yeah.
Oh, sure they are.
Yeah, isn't that what all the newspaper reports say, that when the FBI tries to sneak in guns and bombs just to test, that the security guards always pass with flying colors?
Well, you know, that's true.
Oh, I'm sorry.
No, I'm sorry.
It was the opposite of that.
They always fail miserably.
Yeah.
And I think that's the TSA doing those tests.
Maybe some other agencies have done some tests as well on that.
But no, I mean, it's sad to see how the guard became a laughing stock, and perhaps that made it easier for Bush to kind of slip through this stuff and make it much easier for him to use the guard to suppress the American people.
Yeah.
And now, just the idea that it says right in there that he's going to be able to now use the guard units from one state in another state, I mean, that, to me, just rings of a guilty conscience in the first place.
They don't want to try to use Californians against Californians or Coloradans against Coloradans.
They want to switch.
And, you know, you Coloradans, don't you resent all those Californians, all those rich Californians moving to your state?
Well, now's your chance to pay them back.
Yeah.
Well, it worked for the Roman Empire.
Yeah, for a while.
It's moving the windows around.
Yeah.
I mean, there were so many things about this new law that should have set off all the alarm bells.
And yet, it just kind of slipped into the other statute book, and people were just kind of mosey on their way.
And, you know, this is something which could come into play.
For instance, if a liberal Democrat becomes president and laws are passed to prohibit people from owning semi-automatic rifles, it might be something like the New York National Guard being sent down to Mississippi to round up people's old rifles or their SKSs or whatever.
Or it might be that the National Guard from Alabama would be sent to suppress anti-war protests in Boston.
There are a lot of potential for mischief here.
And yet, you know, it doesn't seem to be ringing any bells.
Well, and this is, you know, how it works in Austin, Texas.
None of the cops around here patrol the neighborhoods they live in.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Well, and I think it's probably like that all over the country, too, that they have the cops patrolling the neighborhood, at least on the other side of the city, if not in the next county, over.
Okay.
Well, yeah, I haven't noticed...
You know, I'm not in the first name base with the cops around here, so I don't know where they live.
Yeah.
Well...
But they probably know where I live.
Yeah.
And I'm certain that they do on local, state, and federal level there, Jim.
You point out in your article here, it's working for the clampdown in the newest copy of the American conservative.
And you say, you know, a terrorist incident that could pass the threshold of this law could be something as meaningless as the Joaquin Hunger Force signs put up around Boston a couple of months ago.
Yeah, I mean, it's very unclear what the standard is, because the actual wording in the law is such that, okay, the Insurrection Act of 1807 stated the president could deploy troops within the U.S. only to, quote, suppress in a state any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.
Well, that's much broader than I would like.
But the new law is much broader, because it says it expands this list to include a natural disaster, an epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack, or incident, or other condition.
And such condition is not defined or limited.
Or other condition?
It says that?
Or other condition, yes.
Say that one more time for the audience, who might have spaced out with all that legalese.
How does that end, now they can, the president can declare martial law based on what now?
The president can effectively waive the Insurrection Act based on pretexts such as a natural disaster, an epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition.
Or other condition.
Yeah.
Oh my God.
There's no definition of condition.
Senator Leahy jumped on this, was kind of waving the red flag on this point, justifiably.
But I guess Congress was too busy ramming through the $500 billion for the Pentagon to bother defying how it was gutting the law.
Well, if Nancy Pelosi can trust George Bush to define whether the Iraqis have lived up to her benchmarks or not, why can't you and I trust his judgment on that other condition, whether it's really good enough for a state of martial law or not?
Well, you know, it would have been interesting, it would have been a little bit different if Congress had passed this, well, it would have been very bad, and I'd be totally opposed to it, it would have been different if Congress had passed this law in, you know, early 2001 when Bush first became president.
But you know, late September 2006, you have a president who for years has lied, has misrepresented what he's doing, has scorned obeying federal law, has trampled various parts of the Bill of Rights, and Congress still gives him this blank check.
I mean, this is the stuff that pushed me to the edge of cynicism.
And now you mentioned Patrick Leahy in the Senate, has spoken out about this from the beginning, but I guess you also said that he doesn't really have any help in the Imperial Senate at all?
He didn't have much last year.
Senator Kit Bond, a Republican in Missouri, is co-sponsoring a bill now with Leahy to get these changes gutted, and going back to the old law, what the old law said.
And I think that they'll probably have some support.
But there certainly doesn't seem to be any bonfire on Capitol Hill to fix this change.
I mean, both parties simply don't give a darn about the possibility of martial law.
Well, I don't know.
How much longer can we go like this before we just stop pretending that the Constitution is in force at all?
I mean, clearly it creates these men's offices, but it in no way binds their power.
All sale and no anchor.
I learned that from Butler Shaffer.
Yeah, he's great.
Butler has some wonderful—Butler does a great job of helping people see through some of the EVF.
I don't know how much longer it can go on.
I mean, my hope is at some point there'll be a backlash.
But I've been hoping that since about October 2001.
And there was some backlash at the polls in November.
And it's great that some of the Democrats are doing a very good job of investigating the Bush abuses.
But as far as the American people or the pundits learning any lessons from George Bush, it seems that the only lesson that people are learning is that they need to find some other ruler who will not seem quite as stupid.
Right.
And that goes to what, like you said, about using the New York guard against people in Alabama to take their guns or something like that.
Here these conservatives are rallying around their great heroic leader, their infallible master George Bush, and yet his office, he holds it temporarily.
And there are at least some indications that he's going to be replaced by Hillary Clinton, who to the average guy in Alabama is Satan himself.
And they think that they're going to let...
Uh, himself or herself.
It's a...
I'm sorry?
Satan himself or Satan herself.
Well, same difference in Hillary's case, right?
I didn't mean to interrupt your risk.
She's a bit androgynous.
Go ahead.
Anyway, yeah, I was just saying, like, what idiocy to turn over all this power to, not to George Bush, but to his office that is soon to be inherited by someone who they consider the enemy?
Well, the New York Sun had a recent editorial calling for Dick Cheney to run for president next year, so maybe some conservatives have hoped that that would be their silver bullet.
Yeah, I mean, it's puzzling to me that so many conservatives could be so blind about investing so much power in the presidency when the tide is turning against the GOP in a huge way.
And even if you look at the leading candidates of the GOP, Giuliani, Romney, these folks...
These are folks who used to be liberals before they ran for president.
Or John McCain, who has a dark history on gun control.
But these folks seem to have a desperation to believe in the supreme leader, and I think that's driving a lot of the perceptions out there.
Just the idea that a conservative would try to imagine what consequences might come from government action, I guess is, what, too much to ask?
I thought that was what conservatism was all about.
Well, it used to be, and there was a long history of conservatives doing a pretty good job of that, and of conservatives judging today's politicians by the lessons of history, but I guess with a war to rid the world of evil, the past is no longer guide.
And now, again, this is something that was touched on earlier, but I don't know if you said it, maybe you did, every single US governor signed a letter saying that they were opposed to this.
Is that not right?
In fact, there was total opposition to that.
And it's interesting how that played out.
The Congress simply ignored them.
CQ's Jeff Stein, he did an excellent article a couple months ago on this, a GOP San aide told Stein, basically blamed the governors for failing to raise more fuss.
The San aide said, my understanding is that the governors sent form letters to offices.
If they really want a piece of legislation considered, the governors should have called offices and pushed the matter.
No office can handle the amount of form letters that come in each day.
The US Senate was not guilty by reasonable form letters.
And since the issue was not on the front page of the Washington Post within the 48 hours before the Senate vote on it, you can't expect the senators to know what they're doing.
Right.
Yeah, what do they know about what bills they're voting for?
It was just half a trillion dollars of appropriations in there.
Yeah, I would, I would bet that the senators have paid a pretty good, paid close attention to how much of that half a billion, half a trillion was going to their home districts as far as contracting and things like that.
Yeah, that's the only interest they have.
Yeah.
Well, they, you know, it's just too bad the Constitution's on earmark.
The congressman might pay attention to it.
Hey, you know what, I'm going to read this paragraph out of your article that I'm breezing over here.
This is, again, working for the clamp down by James Spovard in the newest American Conservative magazine.
He writes, martial law is a euphemism for military dictatorship.
When foreign democracies are overthrown and a junta establishes martial law, Americans usually recognize that a fundamental change has occurred.
Perhaps some conservatives believe that the only change when martial law is declared is that people are no longer read their Miranda rights when they are locked away.
Martial law means obey soldiers commands or be shot.
The abuses of military rule in southern states during Reconstruction were legendary, but they have been swept under the historical rug.
And that's a point worth bringing up right there that the Posse Comitatus Act, just like the Constitution of the state of Texas, were born at the end of Reconstruction, were part of the backlash from Reconstruction.
Part of that legacy here in Texas is that the governor and the attorney general and all the other executive offices are all separately, you know, independently elected, and the governor has basically no power whatsoever.
It's all on the lieutenant governor and the state senate and all that.
Because hey, the military dictatorship just left, and they wanted to make sure that they had as weak a governor as possible.
And then another legacy there is the Posse Comitatus Act that said, all right, not only is Reconstruction over, but we're going to put the final nail in Reconstruction's coffin right here and say anybody who tries to use the military against the American people is a felon and will go to prison for it.
It's a penal code statute, isn't it?
Well, yeah, it's part of the, I'm not sure what title the U.S. code is, but yeah, it's a criminal offense, except when the government does it.
Yeah.
Well, and since it only applies to them and they're immune from prosecution.
Yeah, no one's ever, to the best of my knowledge, no one's ever been prosecuted for violating Posse Comitatus in spite of the growing number of violations of that.
But it's a quantum leap to say that, okay, the Congress or the Justice Department is going to look away when the Pentagon does this or that.
And yet to have, and then to have a law like this, which is a giant, like attaching a giant neon sign to the back of America and saying, kick here.
But that's, this is what the legal code has become.
Yeah, well, and I sort of feel like maybe the reason that there's not more opposition is because people are just overwhelmed.
I mean, there's no limit to the amount of changes, really increases, to executive power that have been made under the Bush-Cheney regime.
I mean, where do you even start?
How do you organize anybody to oppose it?
Well, that's the same problem I have with some of the books I try to write.
You know, yeah, and part of the reason that people did not pay more attention to this at the time it was being considered was that this was the same time that Bush was pushing the Military Commissions Act, which would basically make torture legal, suspend habeas corpus and put in these series of kangaroo courts to try people labeled enemy combatants.
That was really big on my radar screen at that point, and I think I'd heard a little bit about this beforehand by really, you know, I was somewhat myopic on the torture issue at that time, but it's not too late to pay attention to these abuses, and if enough people raise hell long enough, Congress could back down on this.
I wouldn't bet their rent money on it, but...
Yeah, that silence was me holding my breath.
But then I gave up real quick.
Yeah, I was going to say, you know, I hope you aren't going to be doing any deep-sea diving these times, because you aren't going to go very deep.
Yeah, I don't really know what else to say about this, except that I guess if I can again focus on the lesson that when the government fails, that's what's best for them.
Just go into government, get a bunch of people killed, fail in every way, and you guarantee your budget for the next ten years.
Yeah, but try to keep in mind that the real danger here is that the American people might become cynical.
Yeah, well, we don't want that to happen.
Well, this is...
It never happened to me.
Well, praise God.
This chorus on the danger of cynicism is something which I hear in Washington, D.C. every now and then.
It's a favored theme of the pundits, and it seems that they have far more fear of cynicism than government tyranny.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, in your book, Attention, Deficit, Democracy, you talk about cynicism on the American people, and you also talk about people just not even caring in the first place, being so distracted by entertainment that they're just not even paying attention at all.
Yeah, there's so many know-nothing voters at this point, know-nothing citizens, and these are folks who can easily be frightened into submission.
You know, these are the kind of folks who will swallow the terror alerts.
There was a study done at Cornell that showed that from 2001 to 2004, each time the Bush administration issued a terror alert, the president's approval rating rose about 3%, and that was roughly the difference of his victory over John Kerry.
And when you have such a large number of know-nothing voters, it's much easier for a president to be a demagogue, and even for voters that do know something.
Fewer and fewer Americans understand the reason why the Founding Fathers put all these checks and balances in the Constitution, because the Founding Fathers recognized that politicians are dangerous, and that it was important to have them unleashed.
But nowadays, politicians are portrayed as saviors, thanks to the media, to a large degree, and folks, you know, folks forget why these guys are supposed to be in a cage.
Yeah.
Well, and speaking of that, too, I wonder if you think we're going to face new assaults on the Second Amendment with the results of this mass shooting in Virginia.
Yeah, well, it's a very tragic situation at Virginia Tech.
A lot of great folks there.
I think it's one of the finest, you know, well, as someone who went to Tech, I'm biased.
I think it's one of the finest, the most decent schools in the country.
A lot of great students, a lot of great professors, I'm sure that they'll come back.
But this is simply a, this is a tribute to the failure of gun-free zones, because the state of Virginia has got very good laws on concealed carry.
And in that part of Virginia, that's not a part of Virginia, I'd be trying to do that kind of shooting, because folks down there know how to shoot and shoot back without hesitating.
But Virginia Tech was proud to be a gun-free zone.
There were some gun groups to try to get that change in law.
But the Tech fought that in Richmond.
And it's ironic to see so many liberals and psychiatrists and others trying to invoke what happened there to justify giving more power to the government, because this is a classic government screw-up.
There was, there are a lot of questions about how the police failed to respond on this.
I think we'll learn more about that as time goes on, like we did after the shootings in Colorado in 1999 and elsewhere.
Government almost always looks worse the more facts come out on these things.
Yeah, well, I mean, just the initial pictures were of the SWAT teams cowering behind concrete walls and trees while this guy was killing people for 20 minutes inside.
Yeah, I'll be interested to see what further information comes down there.
You know, the government response looks dreadful at this point.
Folks I've talked to down there, let's just say that there's not anybody who's a fan club.
Well, I'll, yeah, there's a lot of questions, but the media's been, had the usual rush to judgment as far as the need to ban guns.
But I, you know, there are fine folks down there in Blacksburg, but I would not count on the Virginia Tech police force to keep my bicycle from being stolen or to prevent me from being shot.
Yeah, you know, I almost want to withhold my criticism because I'm scared that it's going to, you know, triple the size of their SWAT team.
You know, we got to be, it's just like with George Bush, you know, if the world's society is the worst president in history, look out, he's going to bomb Iran.
He's going to try to do something to change that.
Well, yeah, it's just too bad.
Well, I should fail in the air.
Well, the more they fail, the more violent they get, and here you and I do nothing but criticize them for failing all the time.
Maybe we ought to be the champions of government so they'll wither on the vine and go away.
Well, that's not going to work either, is it?
Yeah, I was going to say, what's plan B?
Yeah, C or D, here's something.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, but it's, you know, folks need to keep, you know, there was a, you know, there was a, there's an old phrase, fire and fall back.
And as far as fighting against government abuses and trying to protect liberty, sometimes, you know, one has to fight hard.
And even if you have to fall back, you just kind of wait your time and keep on fighting and hope the tide changes, hope enough people wake up or the government screws up badly enough that there is a strong enough backlash that government can be put back on a leash.
Yeah.
Well, you keep writing and I'll keep interviewing you about what you write.
I appreciate that.
All right, everybody.
James Bovard.
He's the author of a million books, including, and probably most importantly, Attention Deficit Democracy.
It's on the shelf at the bookstore down the street from your house right now.
Run out and get it.
Thanks very much, James.
Hey, Scott, thanks for having me on.
It was fun.
Yeah.
Always good to talk to you, my friend.
All right.
All right, folks.
I'm James Bovard on Radio cast nine five nine FM in Austin, Texas.