For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
It's Chaos 95.9 FM.
In Austin, Texas, I'm happy to welcome back to the show my buddy Jim Bovar.
He is a fellow at the Future Freedom Foundation.
You can sometimes find what he writes in the American Conservative Magazine.
He's also the author of the books, Feeling Your Pain, The Fair Trade Fraud, The Farm Fiasco, Freedom in Chains, Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, and The Masterpiece.
Highly recommended.
Attention Deficit Democracy.
And there's a brand new one coming out sometime soon, I think.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
I appreciate that.
Hey, well, I'm really happy to have you here.
You know, I have to say, it's really hard for me to compete with your other interview today because I don't have any bisexual congresswomen exposed by foreign agents in my story, you know?
I mean, I'm just blown away by that.
You know, I just folded my hand on that one because, you know, that's the story today.
Well, and isn't it interesting?
I guess the question will be, you know, in the days to come, whether anybody's going to pick that up or not.
But on one hand, I think, well, how can the media ignore a sex scandal?
Come on, it's a congresswoman and a sex scandal.
You can't just pretend that doesn't exist.
But then again, remember what happened to that D.C. madam, though.
She had the goods on everybody.
They killed her.
And then the story was gone.
I mean, that was it.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's a fascinating story that civil evidence has on the new issue of American Conservative.
And it is going to be interesting to see who has the balls to pick up and run with this story because I assume there's got to be other stuff out there.
And I'm surprised how much power the Turkish lobby has.
Yeah, well, and, of course, you know, the problem with Sobel's story is that it's a bipartisan story.
And so nobody wants to run with it because they can't use it for their own advantage without hurting themselves.
And apparently.
.
.
So Fox News is not going to pick up on this?
Well, I doubt that.
I don't know, man, what it would take.
But, you know, the thing is, apparently she's already being attacked by liberal bloggers as being some kind of agent of the right-wing smear machine for bringing up this stuff about a Democratic congresswoman.
Oh, my goodness.
Well, I'm glad there was controversy about it, and I hope there's a lot more controversy because the federal government's made such an effort to muzzle her, it would have been a lot easier just to let her say her piece and then prove how she was wrong if the government had the goods to prove she was wrong.
But they've spent so many years and done so much to keep her gagged.
Yeah, well, and now all hell ought to be breaking loose because apparently she decided to just go ahead and answer Filgeraldi's questions completely without beating around the bush anymore.
And the thing I wonder is how much else she has up her sleeve or how many other cards she can put on the table because it's a fascinating interview.
I'm not sure.
Well, I mean, it raises as many questions as it answers.
Oh, it certainly does, even more.
Anyway, we'll see how that goes.
Let's talk about what you've got here in the Freedom Daily, Jim.
Oh, wait, I wanted to ask you first about the new book.
What's the deal with the new book?
Do you have a title?
Do you have a publisher lined up?
When can I read it with my own eyes?
You know, actually, I was hoping to talk to you before we went online on that because, well, anyhow, I can't say anything on that right now.
But you have written stuff.
Can you confirm that?
This is what I do.
This is what I do.
I mean, you know, I get up, I write, you know, sure.
There you go.
All right, well, I'm looking forward to reading whatever else.
I appreciate that.
All right, good.
I'm sure my audience is the same way, too.
I know it.
All right, so here we go.
Future Freedom Foundation, FFF.org, The Post-9-11 Roundup of Innocence, Part 1.
And I believe this is excerpted from Terrorism and Tyranny, is that right?
Well, I hate to admit it, but a large part of it is, yeah.
Well, there's nothing wrong with that.
I mean, republish if it's the most important stuff, which, in fact, this is.
There was a research I was doing as these cases developed back in late 2001 and 2002, which came out in Terrorism and Tyranny in 2003.
And I went back and looked at some of the stuff and touched it up and things like that and made it clear that everybody was guilty, so.
Yeah, well, and wait, we're talking about the feds now or the people that they rounded up?
John Ashcroft.
Yeah.
Oh, well, and see, this is the important news.
And this is why we're not just talking about old news here, because there's some kind of recent court thing that, well, we're getting ahead of ourselves.
But this is what it is timely, ladies and gentlemen out there, because a court has recently ruled that John Ashcroft does not, in fact, have sovereign immunity and that lawsuits regarding this matter against him can't proceed, or at least a single lawsuit against him can't proceed, right?
Well, and I'd like to make it clear that I'm all in favor of John Ashcroft getting a fair trial before he's punished.
Of course, we all are.
He's got to have all his appeals exhausted, and then he can spend the rest of his life in prison.
Well, you know, I think we should at least give one trial.
I mean, maybe have a translator from a foreign language he doesn't quite understand.
Yeah.
It worked for Saddam.
Now, you're talking about an eye for an eye here, because that's what he did to these people, basically.
Well, yeah, there was such a complete travesty of justice after 9-11.
The U.S. government was out.
John Ashcroft and the federal law enforcement was trying to prove they were bona fides by racking up higher and higher numbers of locked up suspected terrorists.
And there was incredible pressure.
There was a lot of pressure on law enforcement to go out and grab as many people as possible.
You know, there were cases of FBI agents looking at phone books for people with Arab names or Muslim names that could be called into question.
I mean, this is a real thorough investigation here, folks.
There were hundreds and hundreds of people that were locked up.
Many of them had their rights completely violated.
The federal government violated court orders a number of times as far as permitting these people to contact their lawyers or to charge them within a certain period of time.
The Inspector General of the Justice Department found that some of these detainees were beaten and otherwise brutalized in federal prison or in federal lockups.
And, you know, John Ashcroft just whistled along here and acted like he was just doing God's work.
And it didn't really matter.
Well, now, there was some kind of pretended law behind this, right?
You can't just round up people by looking up their name in the phone book under American law, can you?
Well, American law, you know, there's the asterisk.
You know, there was a big asterisk after 9-11 which blotted out the rest of the statute book.
Oh, yeah, everything changed and all that, huh?
Yeah.
Well, now, but wait a minute.
I mean, they did pretend, right?
They called them material witnesses or that kind of thing, right?
Well, that was the case with the gentleman who sued Ashcroft for being locked up in 2003, I think it was.
But not all these people, though.
That wasn't kind of the blanket policy for this roundup?
Right.
No.
The vast majority were not material witnesses.
I mean, the standard rule for the FBI agents in the New York, New Jersey area was if they were out looking for people and they ran into some Arab or Muslim male who had a visa violation, he would automatically be considered a 9-11 suspect.
And so that was part of the way that they jacked up the numbers for the number of suspected terrorists.
And this is something which the White House, the Justice Department, FBI, and others kept stressing, and it was a way to keep the fear inflamed after 9-11 and keep people submissive to the federal government.
Right.
Well, and this kind of thing is continuing.
In fact, in the beginning of the show, we were talking about this recent terrorism case where I think they're even saying, right, that one of them wasn't informant and they don't have any real plot, but look, everybody, a guy with a beard and terrorism, and it's a big headline, but I don't know why I should believe a word these people say at this point, Jen.
Well, and if you look at what they're actually charging these folks with, it's false statements to FBI agents.
There was one guy who was questioned for three days in a row, and apparently at some point the feds say that he made a false statement on that.
It's interesting, a number of these false statement cases have blown up in the feds' faces in recent years because a lot of jurors no longer trust the FBI.
And there's been some pressure to have these interrogations videotaped, but the FBI has fought that tooth and nail.
Yeah, boy, did you see the one, remember the case in Lodi, California where it was the informant infiltrated the family, the father and son, and became best friends and called the dad, dad, and all that kind of stuff, and then entrapped the kid into saying something stupid on an open microphone, which it was ridiculous.
But then there was actually the video of the FBI agent's interrogation of the kid.
And you even had former FBI agents taking on their old agency, saying, oh, come on, this is the most ridiculous confession ever.
Like you mentioned, three days of interrogation straight, and finally they trip him up or whatever.
And this, they actually had the video, I think they played it at the LA Times website, where the kid, he says, you know, he gets the kid to say that his grandfather has a training camp in Pakistan.
And the kid says, yeah, it's in, you know, I forgot which city, he says.
And then he changes the city a few times, and eventually the thing ends up in Kandahar in Afghanistan, is where his grandfather's training camp is.
And then he does a motion with his hands.
He says, yeah, they're training in like, and if you or I, Jim, saw the kid's hand motion, we would think, oh, he's talking about like stick fighting or some kind of thing, right?
Well, the FBI agent says, what, pole vaulting?
And does, and finishes his own hand movements like they're pole vaulting.
In this Al-Qaeda training camp that's in the basement of his grandfather's house, that's now in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
And the kid says, yeah, that's right, pole vaulting.
The terrorists are training in pole vaulting.
And this kid's in prison now.
They almost, his dad had a hung jury.
He wasn't acquitted.
He had a hung jury.
The kid is now doing life for 30 years or something.
Well, you know, just keep in mind, basement pole vaulters are the most dangerous of them all.
I just think what a terrorist could do with that kind of experience, you know?
Well, it's just, I mean, it's really great that there was a videotape of the so-called confession.
You know, I hope somebody was videotaping the interrogations last week of these folks, these latest suspects.
But it's amazing how the vast majority of the media just kowtows every single time.
It doesn't matter how many, you know, there have been so many terrorist cases since 9-11, which you follow closely, you've written about, how almost all these terrorist cases turned out to be either smoke or BS.
Right.
In fact, while there was Mosawi and there was Richard Reed, the shoe bomber, I'm trying to think of another one of these where it was credible at all.
Well, the paintball guy.
Well, maybe, but they were told either you plead guilty or we'll call you enemy combatants and turn you over to Don Rumsfeld and the CIA to be tortured.
That's your plea bargain choice.
And so they pled guilty.
So as far as I'm concerned, they're innocent.
Yeah, well, it's a very strange, it's curious how the federal courts have left prosecutors to use plea bargains in a way that seems to totally trample the Fifth Amendment as far as the right of, well, numerous Fifth Amendment rights.
Right.
Well, okay, so now give us some examples, because you actually go through story by story and give us examples of these innocent people.
I think one of these, the guy said that he met some Saudi pilots at the airport and they tried to recruit him into pilot training.
And then I guess after September 11th, he saw the mugshot or whatever and said, hey, that's the guy who tried to train me, went to the FBI, they arrested him and then deported him.
Yep.
Yeah, there was at least one guy, if not more than that, there were two people that landed in jail because they tried to help the government investigate terrorists.
The guy you mentioned was a Palestinian living in Texas and he had voluntarily contacted the FBI after 9-11 to tell them about meeting the Saudi pilots at a restaurant in Dallas and they tried to sign him up.
But this is a guy who was interrogated for 15 hours and then jailed for two months for overstaying his visa.
And he said he was heavily abused by other inmates during the jail.
There was also a Palestinian living in New England who voluntarily went to the FBI office in Bridgeport to tell them that he recognized pictures of the hijackers.
He was locked up as a material witness, held in solitary confinement for 120 days.
And this is how the government treats people who try to help the government in these cases.
The government was hysterical.
You had people like John Ashcroft who acted like the Constitution simply did not apply.
Well, and in fact implied in testimony before Congress that you're a traitor, Jim, and you bring up these phantoms of lost liberty when this is all just necessary and you are actually, in his words, providing aid and comfort to the enemy, the language directly out of the definition of treason in the U.S. Constitution.
Yeah, that was testimony.
I think he was given that, that Ashcroft used that line in the testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on December 6, 2001.
I was watching that live on C-SPAN.
And it was such a bellwether.
Ashcroft said, Charges of kangaroo courts and shredding the Constitution give new meaning to the term the fog of war.
Since lives and liberties depend upon clarity, not obfuscation, and reason, not hyperbole, let me take this opportunity to make clear each action taken by the Department of Justice is carefully drawn to target a narrow class of individuals.
Our legal powers are targeted at terrorists.
Our investigation is focused on terrorists.
But that was complete crap, and Ashcroft knew it.
Because they grabbed all these people, and in almost every case, there was nothing substantive there.
They were simply, well, here's someone who had a couple of false claims on their credit cards.
Here's someone who had a visa violation.
But it was profitable for Ashcroft, Bush, and others to say, there are all these terrorists out there, so by God, the government needs absolute power.
And too bad we have to start torturing people, too.
Yeah, well, the whole world's a battlefield now.
Yeah, and it was just such a sign, such a bellwether, that Ashcroft was being most demagogic at the time that he and the Bush administration were already effectively seizing absolute power here within the U.S. as far as being able to lock people up, to brutalize them, to suspend habeas corpus.
Right, well, and you talk about here, I mean, the obvious case that comes to mind, to me, is the Padilla case, where it was time for, he was being held as a material witness, and it was time for one of his hearings, and the judge said, all right, so where is this guy?
Bring him before me.
And they were like, sorry, man, we already turned him over to the Navy.
So, you know, tough.
And I believe, at the time, the judge said, no, bring him to me.
And they said, no.
And so that's the obvious one, but you describe, especially, I think, in Part 2 here, your article, again, the Post 9-11 Roundup of Innocents, at fff.org, Jim.
You say that John Ashcroft was basically doing everything he could to obstruct the judicial branch, and anything that the judges were trying to do to oversee his roundup of Muslims after 9-11.
Right, there were so many dirty tricks the feds used in order to block due process.
And I think, well, I assume Ashcroft, and I think a lot of other people knew, that most of these folks who were being charged as suspected terrorists had nothing to do with 9-11, or had nothing to do with other terrorist groups.
But it was the same kind of false claims the government makes during a war, as far as that they've conquered this enemy territory, they've conquered that enemy territory.
And the feds got in the habit of bragging about how many people they'd locked up.
There was a case of a guy who arrived at the Newark, New Jersey, train station on October 11, 2001, and what this guy did was ask a cop for directions to his immigration attorney's office.
The cop asked him where he was from, he said Egypt.
The cop asked if he had a visa.
This guy said it was expired and he was going to see his lawyer about it.
Boom.
He was locked up as a suspected terrorist.
And this is some guy who asked a cop for directions.
It kind of makes you think twice about asking police for directions, but that's another story.
Yeah, well, I think everybody should know better than to deliberately bring themselves to the attention of a cop.
I mean, I don't know how many times I read where some guy gets tased or shot by the cops on his own porch, where it's the guy that called 9-11 in the first place that gets the brunt.
I guess they don't like being bothered.
But there were so many cases sifting through these details, and most people have forgotten the absurdities which permeated the law enforcement and the news media after 9-11, because it's amazing that more of the mainstream press didn't stop and holler BS as far as all the crap the government was doing.
And there were so many cover-ups.
The government was claiming, well, we have to keep the names of all these people, almost all these people secret, we have to keep the charges secret, because it's all part of some grand mosaic.
That was crap, and the government knew it.
Well, you know, I guess most of these people either were deported or eventually set free.
It's better than having all of them sent off to Bagram or Guantanamo Bay and that kind of thing, right?
It could have been worse for them.
Well, that's a high standard.
There were so many lives and families that were ruined by this, though.
And it's important to recognize how both politicians and law enforcement profiteered off of these false charges, because someday there's going to be some other incident in this country, and the government's going to pull out the same bag of tricks, and people need to recall what the government did last time around.
Right.
Well, of course, you know, after the Oklahoma City bombing, they got the Counterterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, and nobody asked after September 11th, well, wait a minute, we already passed a giant anti-terrorism act for you people.
Why do you need a Patriot Act?
Nobody said that.
They just said, oh, well, obviously whatever wasn't in the 1996 anti-terrorism law is responsible for 9-11, so we need to just go ahead and give the FBI whatever they want.
Well, and it's a fascinating to see how the federal government itself blundered at 9-11, because there were so many clues that the Fed should have been able to put together.
There were so many warning signs.
There were a number of individuals who tried to contact the FBI or other agencies and say, yo, boss, this stuff's going on, but, you know, part of the trouble was the FBI didn't know how to use computers.
That was part of the legacy of Louis Freeh.
He was anti-computer because FBI agents are kind of like congressmen.
They don't like to read, I guess.
Yeah.
Not all of them.
There are exceptions, but that was the culture of the late 1990s.
That was part of the reason the FBI was just an abysmal failure at being able to analyze the evidence.
Well, and also Louis Freeh's fault is the conspiracy to try to pretend and blame the Khobar Towers attack on Iran and Hezbollah when that was al-Qaeda, guess what, attacking American combat forces stationed on the Arabian Peninsula.
But, no, we don't, you know, it would be better politically to blame that on Iran for whatever reason the Saudis, I guess, preferred it.
And so, you know, that's obviously a major step in the 9-11 attack being successful is FBI Director Freeh's refusal to follow the actual leads on the Khobar Towers attack back in 1996.
Well, it's amazing that Freeh's credibility has survived because there were so many things going back to he came into power after Waco, but he was very heavily involved in trying to cover up Waco and put out a lot of false information on it, as well as on Ruby Ridge.
Yep, well, and he continued to do that same wonderful job.
And you're right, he's still, I guess, a credible guy.
Well, he's a former government employee, that's all you need to know about him.
Well, he's a former head of the FBI and there are so many people in the news media that that's all that they need to know, they will fall to their knees and start polishing his boots.
All right, now, in the last few minutes here, tell us, you know, briefly here, not too briefly, but let us, you know, help us understand exactly what does sovereign immunity mean and what exactly did this court say that, you know, along the lines of John Ashcroft ain't got it?
Well, sovereign immunity basically means that the government has a right to violate, trample your rights and maybe even kill you because it's very important for the government not to be held liable because otherwise the government cannot serve you.
Oh, well, that makes perfect sense, except I seem to remember something from history and I'm pretty vague about, you know, old British history, but wasn't there something where a bunch of nobles and lords held swords to Charles I's throat and they said, no, dude, you don't have sovereign immunity.
And he said, uh-huh, and they said, really?
And then they cut his head off and they proved that, no, in fact, he doesn't have sovereign immunity.
And if that really happened in England way the hell back then, then how could America, which is even more libertarian than England and has a written constitution and all this kind of great stuff, a Bill of Rights and all that, how could we possibly have adopted Charles I's policy in this country to even have a court strike it down?
Well, you know, the Justice Department has been active on this for a long time.
A lot of federal judges, people are chosen to be federal judges often because they're pliant.
And so you've had a lot of people in positions of power who felt it was important for the government not to have to answer to the people as far as when the government violated their rights.
And that, you know, people don't realize sovereign immunity is one of the greatest dangers in their lives because, for instance, going back to the Great Depression, you had Franklin Roosevelt seizing everybody's gold and then almost doubling the gold's value, but it wasn't a violation of their rights because no one can force the government to respect people's rights except the government, and if the government chooses not to do it, then that's too bad.
It's sort of like Dred Scott, only we're all blacks and the government is the whites.
We have no rights that they're bound to respect.
That's very nice.
That's a good line, Scott.
Well, maybe you can make that into a chapter title.
Well, all right.
But no, I mean, sovereign immunity is something I wrote about in Freedom and Change, and it's fascinating to read the legal arguments and documents and see how this evolved because it's such an utter travesty, and this is something which came into play after Ruby Ridge.
It came into play after Waco.
It's come into play with a lot of foreign carnage that's been done by some of the recent U.S. presidents.
And if we can't hold the government liable, then how in the hell are we going to be able to make it to service?
Well, makes sense to me.
All right, everybody, that's Jim Bovard.
You can find him at FFF.org.
The article is called A Post-9-11 Roundup of Innocence, Part 1 and 2.
And I highly recommend his books, especially the last one, Attention Deficit Democracy.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Jim.
Hey, thanks, Scott.
