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All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
Back to it.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Sheldon Richman.
He is the editor of the Freeman, the Journal of the Foundation for Economic Education.
He's a senior fellow at the Future Freedom Foundation, fff.org and he keeps the blog free association at sheldonfreeassociation.blogspot.com and here's another one that little did he know, Matt Barganier helped pick out for me.
When will George W. Bush be tried for his war crimes?
By Sheldon Richman, we're running it on antiwar.com today.
Welcome to the show, Sheldon.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Always good to be with you, my favorite radio host.
Oh, well, thanks very much.
I'm always very happy to have you here.
So, you know, I think that George Bush should be tried for war crimes too.
And so you seem to be saying that you're in a hurry to see that happen and you're upset that it ain't happened yet.
Well, you know, it was prompted by his canceling his trip to Switzerland a few weeks ago.
He was supposed to go to Switzerland and he canceled it after, I think, the Center for Constitutional Rights and also and also some human rights groups in Europe were talking about filing an action against him for violation of international law regarding torture.
And they were also requesting, I think, the prosecution's office, prosecutor's office in Switzerland to file charges.
So Bush canceled.
He claimed it was not for that reason.
His people were saying it's because there were threats of violent demonstrations.
Well, those two things, I think, were related.
But so he canceled.
And that prompted my thinking that, well, you know, if that's the worst he suffers, he can't go to Switzerland or can't travel.
That's not nearly enough, given what he did.
And so that prompted the op ed.
Someone quickly wrote to me and said, well, look, we ought to really be going after Obama because Bush is out of office now.
So his fangs have been removed.
And that, of course, is true.
But like I said, the cancellation of the trip is what prompted this particular article.
Well, and hey, yeah, why not prosecute Barack Obama for war crimes?
I mean, I guess first he's got to be impeached by the House and removed from office by the Senate.
But then he could be indicted and tried for murdering children and then, you know, sentenced to at least life in prison.
Right.
I mean, that's the law.
That's right.
And I think you've had guests on the show getting back to Bush for a second who pointed out that if you don't look backward, which is what Obama says we're not going to do.
In other words, if you don't go after people who have already committed crimes, you're kind of assuring they're going to occur in the future because of no consequences to having committed them.
So looking back is a way of looking forward.
Obama doesn't seem to believe that, but I think that's true.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the other Scott Horton argued back then, say two years ago, that all the pressure should be for a commission.
And there was an argument about whether all the pressure should be for a prosecution or for a commission.
And really, it seems like he was right, because if we'd done that and had, you know, all the pressure be for a commission, then that would have kept the thing going and kept more documents coming out, you know, more recognition by the media and by the people about what really went on.
I mean, they've got this myth that, you know, all George Bush ever did was authorize the waterboarding of Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Well, who cares about them being waterboarded a couple of times when, in fact, you know, tens of thousands of people, Iraq, Iraqis, Afghans and people all over the world and, you know, different gulags in Eastern Europe and at Guantanamo Bay and who knows, were tortured under this system.
And, you know, that the Bush crew did such a good job of spinning it as just a few people and enhanced interrogation and whatever, but out of power, they would not have been able to do as good of a job spinning it.
And, you know, maybe it could have stayed in the headlines.
Maybe the pressure by the people could have been, you know, raised enough to close Guantanamo Bay by now to perhaps even have at least some of the lawyers indicted, if not, you know, Bush and Cheney and them.
But it all went away.
Barack Obama said, look forward, his rank and file said, all right.
And that was basically the end of that whole thing's over and done with.
Right.
And of course, you know, you and I and the other Scott Horton and a whole bunch of other people can try to keep it alive.
I don't know if people care.
It runs, like you say, it runs very, very deep.
I mean, you have these attorneys who were told, hey, find me a justification.
Give me a memo saying this isn't torture.
And, of course, they said, yes, sir.
What time do you need it?
And all those people should be brought before the dock.
And, you know, maybe maybe we're tilting at windmills now, but, you know, we have to keep beating drums on this point.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it seems like we have basic American principles like our own constitution and the rule of law and, you know, and justice for all and things like that on our side.
How can we lose?
It's not fair that we're losing when it's such an obvious thing.
It's against a lot of torture people to death.
Everybody knows that.
You know, what's the debate here?
This is crazy.
Well, I mean, one thing we have helping us out here is this is the fact that these guys can be prosecuted no matter where.
Right.
Anywhere in the world.
I don't know the law nearly.
Of course, this is a way overstatement nearly as well as people like the other Scott Horton.
But as I understand it and the Switzerland case seems to prove this, it can any jurisdiction can bring charges because it's a violation of international agreements.
Well, according to him, it's the United States that has pushed this the whole time.
I mean, you think about indicting Manuel Noriega in a with a grand jury in Miami for breaking laws, not only in a foreign country, but when he's the sovereign of a foreign country, supposedly, and they just indicted him or prosecuted him in federal court.
You know, this week, they're prosecuting.
Well, I don't know this week, but just very recently, they've been prosecuting pirates under international law in federal court in New York City.
Well, so, you know, that that gives us some hope that one of these guys will slip and and travel and get caught.
Now, I realize that Bush can be they can arrange for immunity for Bush.
I think one of your guests maybe was the Scott Horton mentioned how Kissinger manages to travel abroad because they always arrange for immunity.
Right.
And with Bush, they just thought of it too late or something.
So they couldn't do it.
So, you know, having to cancel.
So at least there's pressure.
Look, the Europeans seem to understand this better than we do.
And there's some hope there.
You know, we can just keep our fingers crossed and hope that one of them slips and gets nabbed, you know, on foreign shores somewhere.
I especially want to see Condoleezza Rice brought up on charges.
If I had to pick out one person, I'd pick her.
Yeah.
Well, she chaired the National Security Council meetings when they, you know, quote, choreographed the torture of Katani down there at Guantanamo Bay, the scene where John Ashcroft reportedly said, why are we doing this in the White House?
History is not going to look kindly on this.
I mean, they knew they were guilty in there.
Well, you know, as I say in the article, it's not just torture.
It's the lying into the war into Iraq.
And of course, now we know there are a lot of lies regarding Afghanistan, thanks to the reporting of Anand Gopal and Gareth Porter.
You know, the whole thing was a big fraud.
And we have Condi saying, I remember when she said she was called before Congress to testify and she said, we had no idea they meant that they were going to fly airplanes in the buildings.
And they had a memo that said one of the methods was flying airplanes in the building.
I mean, come on.
I mean, they knew what they knew.
They had so much reason to know.
I'm not a truther.
Well, that guy Boogliosi made the case to that Rice was the go between between the National Intelligence Council that produced the Iraq NIE of the fall of 2002 and George Bush.
And so either she is guilty of lying to George Bush and telling him that that NIE says that Iraq is an imminent threat or he's guilty of lying and saying that it said Iraq was an imminent threat when in fact it didn't, that he, you know, he's the guy that prosecuted Charles Manson and says just purely from a legal murder point of view, either Condoleezza Rice murdered all these young American soldiers who were lied into war or George Bush did.
Indict her and then see if you can get her to flip on the president.
I love it.
I'm a big fan of his book.
I read Helter Skelter years ago and he scared the heck out of me.
Great, great book.
But I know and what about Rumsfeld?
Rumsfeld now changes history and says, I never said I knew where the WMD were.
I said I knew where the suspect sites were.
Well, come on.
This is the day and age of, you know, the tape and the internet.
And we know exactly what he said.
He can dig up the quote.
Everybody can dig it up for himself.
He said he said he knew where the WMD were.
Of course.
Yeah.
He got called out on that by Ray McGovern a few years back.
And he said, look, all the soldiers in Iraq wearing the mock gear, they sure thought he had chemical weapons.
That proved his case, that the people he also lied to believed him, too.
We'll be right back.
It's Sheldon Richman from the Future Freedom Foundation, Antiwar Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Sheldon Richman.
He's the editor of the Freeman, the Journal of the Foundation for Economic Education, senior fellow at the Future Freedom Foundation.
And he keeps the blog free association at free Sheldon free association dot blogspot dot com.
And now I want to talk to you a little bit about what's going on in the Middle East.
I don't know if you saw Moammar Gaddafi's rant on Al Jazeera this morning, Sheldon.
I didn't see it.
I heard some summaries of it.
By the way, you can get to my blog quickly just by Sheldon Richman dot com.
Oh, Sheldon Richman dot com.
That's good.
Yeah.
Shorter and easier.
Yeah.
So he went on ranting for an hour.
And, you know, the guy's a bloody handed monster.
I'm not, you know, diminishing that.
But it was actually pretty hilarious, you know, as far as watching the rant of a falling dictator.
You know, his PR people should have told him, keep it short and sweet and make it sound like you're powerful and everything's going to be fine.
He went on for an hour, you know, and at some at some point just losing train of thought and just kind of bellowing, you know, what the hell's the matter with you people?
You know, just these exclamations of desperation, really something to behold.
It looks like he's going down huge rallies in the streets of Libya.
But so anyway, that's just one example is revolution across the Middle East.
And I just want to know what what's the official position of the Freeman?
What do you think?
About what's going on here, Sheldon?
Well, the Freeman supports freedom.
So it's and one step to freedom.
Freedom is driving your dictator out of out of your country or certainly out of power if you can do it.
I personally was and I heard you say this day after day, loving the scenes out of Egypt and both before and after.
Of course, I didn't love when the other side was using violence, but I love the triumph.
I love the celebrations.
And I just felt so great about what was going on in Egypt and I'm glad to see it spreading.
It's, of course, very sad that the other regimes are not taking Mubarak's lead, at least toward the end and saying, hey, look, let's not the army, let's not even ask the army to shoot our people, shoot their own people, because they probably won't do it.
So why don't we just give up?
I wish they would all be saying that.
Apparently, that's kind of what happened at the end with Mubarak.
I heard your interview with Mr. Giroldi and then he confirmed my own my own suspicions that they went to Mubarak and said, you've got to go.
And he said, what do you mean, shoot them down?
And he said, no, they're not going to shoot them down.
And then I love the story he told about how when people were marching to the presidential palace, the people in the tanks turned the guns away.
That was fantastic.
And I just hope other other soldiers in those other surrounding countries get the same idea.
Gaddafi, well, so, yes, old, death to all tyrants.
I don't know how to say the Latin.
There's a Latin phrase for that, right?
Six temper tyrannous.
Yeah, I think John Wilkes Booth said it after shooting, shooting, shooting Lincoln.
Anyway, we won't go into that.
That's another that's another day.
Gaddafi's always been as great as wicked as Gaddafi is.
Some people say crazy.
I don't really like to talk about people being crazy.
I don't think it helps.
Certainly evil.
He's always been also a cartoon character at the same time.
And he's really looking bad these days.
I mean, really bad is people should have told him, don't go on TV at all.
You look terrible.
Yeah.
And I just hope it emboldens people.
But and I hope and I think we can take some heart out of the fact that the people are quitting his government and some of what military people are defecting.
They're flying planes out of the country.
I don't know if that's all been confirmed.
I was hearing that reported yesterday.
Yeah.
A couple of fires, at least.
In fact, there was a report of another this morning going to Malta instead.
Some some migs going to Malta and some, you know, these other defections and you have ambassadors who are just quitting and calling it a dictatorship.
I mean, this is crumble.
This is this is really good.
I mean, when things crumble like that, that's a great sign.
And I just he just he does seem very desperate.
So I just hope everyone around him realizes, look, this is a sinking ship.
Let's get off this ship if he wants to sink.
Fine.
But I just hope, you know, everybody from his officers all the way down say we're not helping them out.
And then that would be the end of it, because because it can go very, very bad or it could, you know, go quickly and in a good way.
So, you know, I'm on the edge of my seat like like so many of us, even in Egypt, we're still on the edge of our seats because we don't know how things are going to go there.
You know, is a new is a new Mubarak or a new Sadat going to arise from the military?
The economy is the government basically.
I mean, sort of the military basically owns the economy, certainly a huge percentage of it, and runs factories and and shops and tourist attractions and makes a ton of money off of those kinds of things.
And and there's resistance to any true liberalization.
I read this guy, what's his name, Tantawi, who's the field marshal in the defense secretary's kind of running things.
Now, he's always been an opponent of liberalization and they're smearing people as corrupt, who have voiced, you know, spoken in favor of liberalization in the past.
But that place is a rat hole.
It's a rat hole.
Most people are very, very poor.
And there's some very, very rich people who make money off contracts and, you know, special privileges.
And they need to really clean that out.
And I just hope the opposition is sharp and on top of things and not letting the government get away with anything.
Well, no one can know exactly what's going to happen here, but I think anybody with a heart at all has got to be inspired seeing the footage out of Libya, where I mean, they're literally, you know, using military weapons against these unarmed civilians protesting, you know, massing together nonviolently.
And here, you know, they're suffering airstrikes and they keep coming, man, they're marching down the street anyway, facing down fighter bombers, you know, with their bare hands, with their will only.
I mean, that is, I mean, it's sad to see them getting killed.
But, you know, that is, I think, you know, the ultimate of humanity, you know, being willing to stand up like that against such overwhelming odds for what's right, you know?
Well, I agree.
I mean, that takes courage that I can't imagine.
And I just hope the silver lining that comes out of it is it inspires other people in the region to throw off their dictators.
You know, let's hope that the people who are suffering so badly there, who are getting killed by, you know, by planes and tanks and whatever, at least inspire other people to come out, both in that country and other countries.
But yes, it's a terrible, it's terrible.
And I don't even know what I can say at all for, you know, any perspective on it.
It's just heartbreaking.
Well, you know, Muammar Gaddafi in his speech this morning invoked Waco, Sheldon.
Really?
To justify his slaughter in the streets of Tripoli.
Well, then I hope Bill Clinton heard the speech.
Now, I wonder if you think that analogy is apt.
Bill Clinton's president of the world, according to Chris Matthews.
So I assume he's rushing to Libya to talk to Muammar and, you know, tell him Waco's not the same thing.
I'm sure he's got some way to explain that.
Right.
Because what you got to do first is you got to say, oh, all the protesters are child molesters and drug dealers, and then you burn them all to death.
But speaking of Chris Matthews and Muammar, I don't know why I bother with Chris Matthews.
He's not significant enough, but he's one of my pet peeves.
He declared yesterday that Muammar is a bad leader, quote, bad leader.
And the fact that he would even choose the word leader to put into that phrase, I think speaks volumes about Chris Matthews and a lot of the mainstream media, whether they're progressives or conservatives, doesn't really matter.
They still see him as a leader.
Well, you know, after he spent a week defending Hosni Mubarak, he then decided to switch sides to the people in the streets and immediately took the one and only lesson that's obvious from the uprising in Egypt, and that is we don't need a second amendment.
See?
You were.
I'm glad you saw that, too, because I began to wonder whether I really did hear that.
He was a little slow on the uptake, wasn't he?
Didn't he fight against the people in those first few days?
Yeah, yeah.
Hosni Mubarak, he's a good guy.
Everybody knows that.
He's our friend, our friend.
And you've heard him rhapsodized about Sadat, haven't you?
Sadat, he thinks, is one of the greatest heroes ever since Winston Churchill, I'm sure.
Yeah.
Well, and what's not to like about him, right?
He had a lot more charismatic appeal than Mubarak.
I will give Sadat that.
Yeah, well, although that's not saying very much about that guy.
Barbara Walters.
Someone just posted on my Facebook page, forget Mubarak, it's the Fed's terrorism we all need to be afraid of, Max Keiser clip.
Well, there are things that American people need to learn from this, but I'm sure they think there's this huge gulf between what's going on over there and our issues here.
Americans, this exceptionalism runs very deep in people, and there's no relevance whatsoever to what's going on over there and the United States for most people.
You know, it's like...
Well, TV seems to pretty much be over the revolution entirely.
They're kind of sick of it.
That was last week.
We had a revolution in 1776.
We don't need to revisit that.
That's over.
I mean, I'm sure that's the view.
Yeah.
And if you were to say, you know, there are some common themes here, maybe we can learn from it.
They wouldn't.
They would think you're speaking another language.
They wouldn't even know what you're talking about.
Right.
Well, and just look at the parallels where, you know, when you adopt Egypt as your client torture state, it's, you know, you stare into the abyss, it stares back into you.
We've adopted...
In fact, I remember years ago talking about this with Chris Hedges, you know, five years ago or something.
We are adopting Egypt's system of massive secret police and prison without trial and torturing people to death.
And we are turning our system into theirs.
We're supposed to be bragging that, oh, we're the oldest constitutional republic in the world.
Everybody revolt and then copy us.
They have to revolt against us to copy what we claim we're about.
It's different when it's America.
Yeah, always is.
All right.
Well, thanks very much, Sheldon.
It's always great talking to you.
My pleasure.
Everybody, that's the great Sheldon Richman.
He's the editor of The Freeman.
And he writes at sheldonrichman.com and the Future Freedom Foundation, fff.org.
