03/30/10 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And now, it's my good friend Will Grigg.
His blog is called Pro Libertate.
The address is freedominourtime.blogspot.com and his book.
You must read his book.
You can find it at Amazon.com.
Liberty in Eclipse.
Boy, got that right.
Welcome back to the show, Will.
How you doing?
Scott, it's always great to be with you.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us here.
Alright, so before we get to what's really going on here and this and that, go ahead and just kind of fill us in the story of the Michigan Militia guys, what's been busted by the feds here?
It seems to me that you're seeing yet another version of the long-running play, sometimes called National Security Theater, where you've got a group that's peripheral and not particularly well-known and not particularly well-equipped and run by people of socially marginal status who may have said some things that were foolish or perhaps even threatening, who've been hyped into a world historic menace thanks to the needs of the regime that rules us.
This so-called Hutteri Militia didn't really have any roots in what is called the local militia community there in Michigan.
There were a lot of people who looked upon them with suspicion or at least with disapproval because at least one of the people, one of the nine people arrested in this tri-state operation that unfolded starting Sunday morning, appears to have some kind of clinical problem.
He appears to be mentally unstable.
But we've been told endlessly now by the regime's stenographers and the media that this group plotted to kill an unidentified policeman in order to precipitate a police funeral.
These are, of course, events that are a little like the funeral of Lena Brezhnev.
You have just about everybody in the country who wears a government-issued costume and carries a gun show up in one of these paramilitary observances in an air of great solemnity because, of course, there's nothing more important than the death of one of the state's armed enforcers.
And supposedly they wanted to kill this police officer, bring about this huge police funeral, and then set ambushes involving improvised explosive devices to kill other police officers at that funeral, which would be a horrible crime, of course.
It's a horrible crime to murder any human being.
But if you read the affidavit, or rather the indictment, that was issued yesterday by the FBI, there's nothing in that indictment that strikes me as what you would call evidence.
There are a lot of very shocking allegations, and there's reference to what is called the general concept of operations of this group.
There's no specific allegation that there was a particular plan.
There's no specific reference to recorded conversations or particular eyewitness testimony saying that at such-and-such a date or in such-and-such a place this specific thing was said.
It seems to me what you're talking about is a group of people that got together to talk in, if you will, the subjunctive tense about what they would do in the event that they were in a conflict with the federal government, and that this has been transmuted into a plan to levy war against the United States, which is one of the specific charges here.
They were accused of levying war against the United States.
They're charged with seditious conspiracy against the United States for plotting to kill a police officer.
And if you look at this in terms of the way the regime looks at itself, it really is a significant document, not for what it says in terms of the evidence, but in terms of how it perceives the rest of us.
It does perceive itself to be at war with us.
Apparently that's a policy option for the homeland security state, but it's a federal offense when one of us mere mundanes happens to take notice of the fact that the government ruling us is actually at war with us.
Yeah, you know, on MSNBC all the footage of the guys running around, which I guess they got off the website or whatever, was intermixed with the footage of the cops on the scene.
These are domestic police officers, right?
And they're all dressed up like soldiers, too.
I couldn't tell which one were the militia guys and which one was Mulder and Scully.
Exactly.
It's the Orwellian pig-man syndrome at the end of Animal Farm.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
The man in the middle looks like a pig and neither can tell which is which.
Yeah, why would any Americans want to dress up in battle fatigues and think that they need to prepare for conflict with any police?
I mean, it's not like they dress up like military and prepare for conflict with us all day.
All right, well, anyway, we can get back to that.
But I'm confused.
I heard Howard Stern interviewed G. Gordon Liddy.
And he had G. Gordon Liddy retell the story of all the different ways that they were going to murder John Anderson, the columnist they didn't like, when he worked for Richard Nixon.
And they talked about poisoning him to death, I think some piano wire around the neck, blowing up his car, different things like that.
And I'm trying to remember exactly the way Liddy phrased this to Howard Stern.
He said that as long as we're sitting around saying, well, we could poison his Tylenol with arsenic, or we could wrap a piano wire around his neck, or whatever, and even though they're very serious that these are actually the people who would very seriously carry out an act like that against a newspaper columnist that Richard Nixon didn't like, but that as long as they're talking about it in that sense, it's perfectly legal.
And it's only illegal if they say, all right, let's go.
And they actually take affirmative steps, or at least agree to take affirmative steps to actually carry it out.
At that point, you cross the line under conspiracy charge.
And yet, apparently, am I right that the FBI is not going that far in this case?
I saw Rachel Maddow last night gleefully explaining that they're being charged with seditious conspiracy, which, thank goodness, you don't have to have actually done anything to have done anything under that one.
And I'm of the opinion that there should not be laws against sedition, because I consider sedition to be our holiest and most important civic tradition.
I don't see how you can actually prosecute people for sedition in a country that was started by people who rebelled against the government claiming to rule them.
I mean, the American perspective is, I think, best encapsulated in that wonderful quote at the beginning of the 1992 version of Last of the Mohicans, where Hawkeye, being chastised by a British officer for a lack of devotion to the crown, is being told by this British officer, will you call yourself a patriot and a subject of the crown?
And Hawkeye replies, I don't consider myself subject to much of anything.
That's the American spirit.
And I don't see how you can rationalize having sedition laws in light of our heritage.
Well, and even as an elementary school kid, we all learned that it's right there in the Declaration of Independence that men are born free, and they have the natural right to overthrow any government that they don't see as beneficial to securing their liberty and prosperity, period.
Exactly.
I mean, you're talking about something that is literally inscribed in the founding document of America before America was a country.
I mean, it is that deeply rooted in the ontology of what you would call the American experience.
But yeah, under seditious conspiracy, supposedly, supposedly, you would have the option as a prosecutor of at least charging somebody.
And of course, it's getting charges filed against these people that is the objective here.
They want to be able to browbeat these people into some kind of a plea bargain agreement, I contend, that would result in an enhancement of the government's stable of potential informants and stooges and provocateurs.
This is a business that replicates itself in a manner akin to that of network marketing, really, when you take a look at the way it's structured.
Or cancer.
I mean, there are a couple of different ways that you can look at it.
But the charge, of course, is more loosely defined.
And whether or not we should have laws against seditious conspiracy and seditious libel, those enactments, which the government requires us to call laws, are on the books.
And so they can be used because they give greater flexibility here.
In terms of what G. Gordon Liddy was saying about the legal standing of violent speech, or speech that embraces violence, I don't think that speech itself can be violent.
I think it's category error to refer to it as violent.
But the controlling precedent is still what?
The Brandenburg v.
Ohio ruling of about 31 years ago.
And that involved some Klan ruler who was giving an incendiary address in Ohio, challenging violence against people whom he didn't like.
People who were non-whites, blacks, Jews, people of that sort.
And what the Supreme Court said in ruling against prosecution of this individual for seditious libel was that all speech is innocuous to the extent that there remains time for it to be countered by other speech.
And so if you're talking in the subjunctive tense, once again, about things that you may do under certain circumstances, you really can indulge yourself in terms of whatever lurid or violent fantasies you would find appealing.
But it's when you are actually putting the plan into action that you have crossed the line into an overt act that threatens the life of another human being.
So I think that that's a good and sound distinction here that is completely ignored in this indictment.
Yeah, well you know, there's a couple of things about that indictment.
First of all, they have a lot of oh, they said this and they said that and they discussed this and that, which I think makes it pretty clear that one of the militia guys was actually an undercover cop or a flipped informant.
In fact, I haven't read this, but I saw Rachel Maddow's show last night and yeah, I know, I'm kind of a masochist, I guess.
And she was saying that the FBI had infiltrated this group for several months leading up to this.
So, you know, it's a pretty safe bet, isn't it?
All the worst of this was what the informant tricked them into saying, basically.
Yeah, almost certainly.
And of course there was, as I point out in the essay that they published yesterday about this subject, another crackdown that occurred within the last week or week and a half involving, once again, a completely ignominious group of street criminals that call themselves the White Wolves.
They consider themselves to be Aryan supremacists out in Connecticut.
And you had a case where somebody showed up who was a veteran of the terrorist and criminal and informant finishing school that we call the Federal Penitentiary System.
And he offered to buy firearms from these people after describing himself as a felon.
And that, of course, was the sole supposedly criminal offense listed in the indictment.
And then this was used, basically, as the one little grain of sand that was turned into a pearl through the language of the indictment.
I mean, you have a group of people, basically they're low-level street criminals.
They're like the Black Widow Biker Gang from those Clint Eastwood movies in the late 1970s, a pathetic little group of completely marginalized and disreputable people, no particular threat to the community in spite of the best efforts of the ADL to try to treat them as if they were the germ of a renascent Third Reich.
And suddenly a federal agent provocateur shows up and induces these people into committing some kind of an overt act.
And on the basis of that one overt act, the people who are involved in weaving these tapestries of alarm for the federal prosecutors create this monumental indictment, making it look as if they just stopped the Anschluss in its tracks.
And it's the same type of a dynamic that we have here with the Hutteri militia.
You're probably right, and I didn't get to see the Rachel Maddow report last night, and it wouldn't have been considered to be a highlight of my evening if I had, but the fact that she would say that they had infiltrated this group for several months doesn't surprise me.
And if you hearken back just to last October with that raid in Dearborn against that mosque where we were told that there was a group of Islamic separatists who were involved in all kinds of horrible and hideous things involving an attempt, once again, to levy war against the United States, you read the indictment in that case, actually not the indictment, I just read the preliminary complaint that was used to justify the search warrants that were served, and this involved the death of a 53-year-old imam, I'm probably not going to pronounce his name correctly, Luqman Amin Abdullah, I think is how you pronounce his name, and he had a criminal record, a simple assault conviction way back in his early 20s, that was three decades ago.
But if you read the criminal complaint, you have the same type of situation here, where there was an informant, there was a guy who called himself Jibril, who was, once again, a veteran of the prison system, he shows up and ingratiates himself in the mosque over the course of a couple of months, or longer, and he was a white man in the middle of a black mosque in Dearborn, who was going out of his way to make himself helpful and friendly, and he was giving them money and all these things, he was the one who invited these people to the warehouse, he was the one who suggested that they move all the goods, the stolen goods, that were the focus of the criminal indictment, he suddenly showed up that morning and said, I've got to move this material into the warehouse, and so these people were helping him to move the material, these stolen goods, that were purchased by the FBI with FBI money, into a warehouse that was rented by the FBI, and at a moment he said, well I have to go get a drink of water, he disappears and the FBI shows up, and then they shoot this imam 21 times, because he supposedly shot at one of their dogs, one of the FBI special agent canines, and according to the autopsy report, the imam apparently had suffered injuries consistent with being mauled by the dog, he might have shot the dog in self-defense, but in any case he was lying there prone and bleeding, when he was shot 21 times, including several times in the groin and genitals, which is an interesting little detail, and then handcuffed, and while this is going on, the FBI is actually airlifting the dog for medical treatment, while this human being is bleeding onto the floor of a warehouse that they rented, full of goods that they had bought, that they were seeking defense with an informant they were paying for, I mean this is one of those immaculately conceived crime capers that is an insular affair, scripted and carried out by the federal government, you probably have the same kind of thing going on with uttery, and we're going to be seeing the same kind of thing happening, I contend, much more frequently, because this is the sort of stuff on which the homeland security state thrives, it needs the security theater for public relations, it needs it basically to create the image on the part of the public's perception, that we are encircled by, and indeed infused with, all these dreadful enemies against which the state has to protect us.
Well, and just like bombing the Middle East endlessly in order to prevent terrorism there simply guarantees that we'll have, our government will have more excuse for more intervention later on, this thing really is a self-perpetuating thing too, just in the sense of, you know, how many people today are thanking their lucky stars that they bought a rifle since Obama became president, how many people are going to go out and buy more rifles, how many people see this as, you just described it, you know, a portent of things to come, and how things are going to be more and more, at what point is it actually the right thing for us to do like the Continentals and throw the Imperial Army off with violent force?
Well, I would hope that we'd be able to do it through peaceful withdrawal, that would be my preference, because I don't want to see any human being anywhere be killed through violence.
I have an unconditional commitment to the sanctity of every individual human life.
I do recognize the legitimacy of lethal defensive force.
I wholeheartedly subscribe to the non-aggression axiom, whether you're talking about personal relations or relationships between groups of people, including governments, unfortunately, and I'm glad that you brought this up, Scott, we're talking about really an undifferentiated policy of imperial coercion, whether you're talking about what the regime does overseas or what it does here at home, it uses the same methods, it uses pretty much the same pool of manpower.
The police, meaning state and local police, are disproportionately well represented, if you will, in guard and reserve units that go overseas and really receive training in all these foreign imperial wars that they then employ on the streets of American cities.
And indeed, many of the same tactics that we see in military operations in urban terrain, in places such as Iraq and now in Afghanistan, were field tested in the inner cities of the United States.
I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating, the first place I saw the expression clear and hold being used in terms of urban warfare was not in Iraq or Afghanistan or Lebanon or Haiti or Somalia.
It was in L.A. in the course of counter-drug operations or so-called counter-gang operations in the early and mid-1990s.
It's the same regime.
It really is one undifferentiated mass of brutal imperial coercion.
Well, you know, I just saw, maybe three weeks ago or something, they did a special about the drug wars and the gang wars between the Crips and the Bloods in the 80s and early 90s in Los Angeles, and it was mostly interviews with old cops who were, you know, the Robert Duvall and Sean Penn of their day or whatever out there.
And to hear them tell it, it was like listening to soldiers talk about, you know, how these problems, you know, create themselves in, or seem to create themselves right in front of their eyes in Iraq.
And they just go, yeah, you know, so there's really, we make cocaine illegal, so it's really expensive.
So the only way black people, poor black people in south-central LA can afford to use cocaine is by rocking it up.
And so they do.
And we have a secret war going on in Nicaragua, and, you know, Erwin Meneses bringing all the cocaine in.
That's the source for all this crack epidemic.
And then as the gangs fight over the territory and the violence gets out of control, well, then the cops come in with their counter-insurgency tactics, which means first random sweeps, all fighting aged males get rounded up and thrown in the local Abu Ghraib where they all get radicalized and teach each other how to fight and join each other's gangs and get more integrated and more resentful, more and more resentful against the cops.
And then the violence back against the cops escalates.
So the cops all buy M-16s and tanks and escalate the thing even further.
And then, you know, it kind of turns out the whole thing just basically petered out when the fights over the turf wore through and the contra-cocaine supply dried up.
And the whole thing was basically, you know, unnecessary.
But to listen to the cops describe the different stages of the conflict, it was just like how you take over Iraq.
It's the cops as the U.S. infantry and blacks of south-central Los Angeles like the people of Fallujah.
That's exactly right.
And what is left, of course, is a heavy residue of precedent, which is then used to start and amplify the process elsewhere or perhaps even nationally.
And by way of describing how fungible the tactics and methods used at home and overseas can be, it's useful to go back to the first real imperialist conflict that the United States was involved in, which was the effort to pacify the occupied Philippines after they were supposedly liberated by the United States.
They didn't need to be liberated, of course.
That was in the Spanish-American War, which is complete exercise in imperial aggression by the United States government in the late 1890s.
But one of the methods that was used by way of fighting against the Philippine insurrectionaries just wanted to be independent of foreign control was what was called the water cure, and that's now called waterboarding.
And the military official, and I can't remember his name, the military official who was presiding over the counterinsurgency effort at the time who authorized waterboarding was a former chief of the New York City police, and he had used that method in his domestic service as the police chief in New York City.
And this was just, of course, a couple of decades after the NYPD was created basically by coalescing an enforcement unit out of the Irish street gangs in New York City.
But the thing was, they used that method overseas against the insurrectionaries, and it had been used here domestically.
And for about 20 or 30 years, there was a big debate over it.
I mean, Mark Twain and a bunch of other anti-imperialists actually got involved in trying to get something done in terms of prosecuting people who had used that torture method against the Filipinos.
And the American Bar Association of all the unlikely groups was the one that really took the initiative and got that and the other third-degree methods banned in the late 1920s.
But here we are again in the opening decades of a new century where we've seen how that's sort of made the loop, and now that's being slowly integrated into use, once again overt use, by military and intelligence professionals, that and other methods of torture.
And at the same time, we're seeing where these methods that were field-tested overseas in terms of military urban operations are becoming standard operating procedure for police in many parts of this country.
Just about every police department of any size has a tactical or SWAT unit that is being trained by the same people who conducted the Fallujah campaign.
I don't think necessarily we're going to see Willie Pete being used in American context here, but then again, you think of the bombing of the MOVE in Philadelphia in 1985, and you wonder if that isn't the same kind of an operation.
Look what they did to the Branch Davidians.
There are people to this day, Will, who believe that the Branch Davidians were building an army and were preparing to march on and conquer Waco.
Exactly.
No limit, apparently, to the fiendish ingenuity and the resources of these socially marginalized groups of that kind.
Well, now hold on a second, because we're running out of time here, but I've got to ask you this, because the Davidians is one thing.
They were not a militia.
They simply were a group of religious people, and they had a gun business, and that's the end of that argument.
Very peaceful and unassuming.
But now what about these militia guys?
I mean, obviously you have represented a major leadership position.
You have held a major leadership position in terms of the anti-government populist right wing in this country for a long time, Will, and a lot of these guys look to you.
Is this the right thing for people to do, is go out and get armed and prepare for the government to go to war against them?
I mean, you saw what happened in this case.
These guys got arrested.
They didn't fight, and that's the right thing, isn't it?
Yeah.
Well, I have to say that with respect to organizing a militia of this kind, if you organize a group of this kind, it can and most likely will be infiltrated.
Just in practical terms, look at what the government learned here.
They learned that the militia was willing to cooperate in dealing with the effort to round up and arrest these people.
They learned that the militia, when put to a matter of cases, is going to turn, it's going to flip, it's going to cooperate, it's going to collaborate.
And I don't know whether or not that holds true of militia units across the country, but by and large, if you create an institution, if you have institutional concerns that you're trying to protect here, that's going to be used against you.
So in practical terms, I don't know if that will avail us much.
I have an unconditional commitment to the idea that we have the individual right to arm self-defense, that we can exercise that right in cooperation with other people, and I'm not going to repudiate that.
But I think that people have to check their seals, if nothing else, because chances are, if you're big enough and prominent enough to have a website and some profile in the community, and the militia units there in that part of Michigan, once again, were working in civic initiatives with the local government, which is all to the good.
I mean, they were helping in search and rescue operations and things of that kind.
That's very worthwhile.
But with that type of access and that type of prominence comes the very high probability that you're going to be targeted and you're going to be infiltrated, and the federal government, which really can't make anything worthwhile or manufacture anything of any value, is wonderfully adept at manufacturing rationales for criminal prosecution.
The only thing government makes are criminals out of innocent people and corpses out of living human beings.
And this is the sort of thing that they excel at, sending somebody into your group who's just full of all kinds of helpful suggestions and is probably going to lead you right carefully into an ambush in the form of a federal indictment.
So that's something people have to bear in mind when they're considering the logistics and really the potential value of organizing as regular militia units of this kind.
Once again, I prefer something that's decentralized.
I prefer something that's not vulnerable to that type of systemic infiltration and manipulation.
And that, of course, is the way I would prefer to do things.
Preferably, I would like to see peaceful secession.
I would like to see people recognize that you don't have the right to kill somebody who doesn't want to be part of your club.
But within the context of humanity and human nature as we know it, there's always going to be, unfortunately, the legitimate role for armed self-defense.
Just be prudent and judicious in the way that you exercise that right.
Well, you know, it seemed to me that, I mean, you look at the 1990s and all the militias that came up after Waco and all that kind of thing.
Basically, well, a lot of them kind of went away after the Oklahoma City bombing.
And, of course, kind of really went away with the election of George Bush, who somehow was one of us and not part of the establishment or something like that.
But even though he was George Bush's son.
I know.
Never mind all that.
But the thing is, basically, all these militias had a lot of good time doing target practice, hanging out on the weekends, maybe drinking some beers.
And nothing ever did happen.
And it seems to me, well, I guess my hope is that that's how it'll be in this era of Democrats in power, too.
You know, for some reason, these people aren't scared of Republicans.
But, I mean, it's not like Obama is going, especially not a Democrat, is going to try to actually, you know, wage a real war against the American people, suspend the Constitution and declare martial law and all these things.
I mean, these are the lines that would have to be crossed to make it legitimate for a Michigan or any other militia to actually say, like, all right, we're a militia unit at war inside these borders, you know, either protecting ourselves from or attempting to overthrow the power of the U.S. government.
We're still a long way from there.
These guys, again, were arrested by civilian cops, even though they were dressed as soldiers.
They were read their rights.
They've been indicted.
And they, you know, get rid of habeas corpus on their third appeal after they're convicted and everything else.
So it seems to me as long as there are still judges in black robes open for business, then the militia guys ought to be doing nothing but target practicing.
And the line is pretty obvious, right?
Yeah, target practice is a worthwhile activity.
I've got no problem with that.
The idea of keeping your powder dry and having a lot of powder around, that's perfectly worthwhile, too.
One thing I would look for in this particular case is how seriously the government is going to pursue the seditious conspiracy charge.
If they actually get to the point where these people are being treated as if they were actual combatants against the United States government, there are some potentially awful consequences that would flow from that that would have tremendously damaging potential.
There's precedence for use against people who have no ambitions about actual war, defensive or otherwise, against the federal government.
That's the key thing to look at.
Now, call me naive, Will, if you want, but, well, the Democrats have learned the lesson that they can't try to pass a bunch of gun control laws or even imply that they're really pro-gun control because they will just lose elections.
They've basically given up gun control as a platform.
I mean, I can't imagine Obama or even Eric Holder or any of the worst of these people thinking that they could, you know, really do some giant, you know, martial law, round people up, you know, a giant step forward in power like that.
They might create another layer of homeland security or something.
But as far as that whole, you know, worst case scenario type thing, that's not happening any time in the next four or eight years, man, unless some cities start blowing up or something.
You're probably right.
And I think that we're seeing a period of consolidation here.
But the steps you're talking about would probably not be taken until and unless we end up with another Republican in the White House.
They're the ones who tend to take the quantum leaps in the direction of an outright garrison state.
And they're the ones that the militias will put their guns down for.
Yeah, I know.
Isn't that the killer irony in this whole situation?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I guess, you know, in a way, it's kind of better to have Democrats in power and get a little bit less police state and at least the guys with the guns are anti-government for a change.
A little more vigilance.
For a little while.
Yeah, a little less aggressive pursuit of martial law on the part of the government, a little more vigilance on the part of the people who are at least part of the time anti-government.
That's a pretty good combination, yeah.
Ah, jeez.
Well, except that the anti-war movement is gone.
So the slaughter of foreigners continues unabated.
That's the compensatory misfortune here, of course.
I kind of love that two-party system.
Oh, exactly.
You know, which wing of the bird of prey is in power?
That depends upon whether foreigners are going to be slaughtered or American liberties are going to suffer.
Or both.
I mean, we had both of them under the Bush regime.
So it really isn't an attractive menu of options, unfortunately.
No, I'm afraid not.
All right.
Well, listen, I know you've got to go, but I really appreciate your time on the show, as always.
Oh, Scott, thanks so much.
It's always great to be with you.
Oh, wait, wait.
One more thing.
I used to say it's pro-libertate, because that's what it looks like.
It is pro-libertate.
Pro-libertate.
Okay, good.
All right.
Thanks again, Will.
Thanks.
Take care, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That's William Norman Grigg.
The blog is pro-libertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
And the book is Liberty in Eclipse.
Everybody, Scott Horton here for LibertyStickers.com.
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