Thanks for the kind words. I appreciate that. It's great to be down here in Auburn.
It's my first time down here. It's inspiring to be among all these hardliners here.
Might have a good influence on me to counteract living in Washington.
Is that working? Can you hear it in the back?
This has been a real good week for me. A lot of good things have happened.
I got noticed a couple days ago. Actually, I filed the application about eight months ago,
but I just heard on Wednesday that I've been approved by the INS and FAA to have flight training school down in Florida.
And, you know, I was a little bit worried about it because I was afraid if the FAA heard I was speaking at the Mises Institute
that, you know, that they might consider me a terrorist risk, but I guess the FAA is not that well organized yet.
You know, it's probably in the same category as the rest of the government.
You know, I want to talk a little bit about freedom and terrorism and what the Bush administration is doing.
It's fascinating to see how Bush is playing these themes and how almost all the media is buying into his rhetoric and his spiel.
Two weeks after the 9-11 attacks, George Bush announced that the terrorists have, quote,
has awoken a mighty nation that understands that freedom is under assault, a mighty nation that will not rest until those who think they can take freedom away from any citizen in the world are brought to justice.
You know, from one point that sounds very libertarian, unfortunately, this is from a speech that Bush made to FBI agents at FBI headquarters.
And it was a speech he made just after his Justice Department had proposed an anti-terrorism bill, which among other things would have cancelled habeas corpus.
But Bush keeps invoking freedom almost on a daily basis. It was one of the themes of the State of the Union Address, and he's gotten away with it.
Yet since September 11th, the Bush administration has moved far along to turning America into a two-tier society.
Those who the law fails to bind and those who the law fails to protect.
Thanks to the success of 19 terrorists, Federal agents could have far more power over all Americans in perpetuity.
The Bush's USA Patriot Act, the anti-terrorism bill rushing the law after the attack, is perhaps the biggest bait and switch in US constitutional history.
This is a law which treats every citizen as a suspected terrorist and every Federal agent as a proven angel.
But unfortunately, the vast majority of the new power the government has seized will do little or nothing to make Americans safer.
I want to talk a few things about some of the different aspects of this Patriot Act.
There's been a little bit of it in the press, but a lot of it's been kind of, they've either soft-pedaled the criticism,
or else it seems like they're getting their information from the Justice Department.
Department, but something we now have thanks to this Patriot Act is nationwide roving wiretaps.
It's easy for the Justice Department to go in and get a warrant now and say that, well, that there's a suspect
who might be using a telephone at Auburn or something like that, and voila, the feds can come in and get a wiretap
on almost all those phones. If a suspect is using several phones in a Boston airport, for instance, the feds can put
There is no need to try and target the actual violator and perpetrator for surveillance.
It's even worse with email, though. Thanks to this new law, the FBI's got a green light to vacuum up the nation's email.
Congress, for the first time in this bill, officially approved and encouraged the FBI to use its carnivore email wiretapping system.
I don't know how much y'all have heard about carnivore and first it first came to light about I think in the summer of 2000 and it was kind of funny that the FBI would name a wiretapping program carnivore you know and there was there was a little controversy about that and someone said well you know but the reason that it had that name was the FBI thought people would never learn about its existence so I mean that certainly explains it but something that the Congress of the Justice Department has done it has changed the
Program's name. It's now something like DSL 5000 or something like that. It's some nice
arcane name that helps people sleep at night. But carnivore is contained in a black box
that the FBI compels internet service providers to attach to monitor all the email their system
handles. Though a carnivore cap might be imposed because of a single targeted client, the software
If you're a well-targeted client, the software sets that it automatically intercepts all the email going through that ISP.
And the standard for imposing that first wiretap is almost non-existent.
The only thing an FBI agent has to do is certify to a judge that the information sought is, quote, relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.
All he has to say, and then they automatically can install the carnivore and suck up everybody's email.
Judges have no power on this. The judges must approve the wiretaps based on the federal agent's unsubstantiated assertions.
It doesn't matter if the person is being targeted for trying to smuggle in a nuclear bomb or if he's accused of dodging taxes, $100 in his IRS, Form 1040.
It doesn't matter if the citizen is guilty or innocent, it's putting wiretaps on automatic pilots and making wiretaps far more sweeping than they've ever been before.
And there are other things that are compounding this damage.
For instance, the Patriot Act makes it very easy to get permission to do sneak and peek searches now, in which the feds come in, FBI comes in or other agents come in and do a secret search in your house
and perhaps notify you a few days later that they visited and perhaps give you a list of the things which they carried off, perhaps not.
I mean, and some of these search warrants could be gotten on an ex-fo facto basis.
So it's really done wonders for the flexibility for federal agents.
You know, it certainly made their jobs easier, but there are other things which are just compounding these dangers level by level.
level by level. For instance, something the FBI is doing now, it's doing much more often now, it's installing keystroke monitoring software on people's computers.
This means that once this software is installed, that the FBI doesn't need to be there, it doesn't need to be within five miles, but the FBI can track every word you type, every letter you type.
And this is a way to completely defeat things like pretty good privacy software or other encryption software
because the whole key to those is your password.
And if the FBI can do a keystroke monitoring to find out what your password is, well, that certainly simplifies their job.
Something else that the FBI is up to is something called Project Cyber Night, which they're finishing up something called Magic Lantern,
which is a computer virus which they're planning to insert into targeted computers.
Now the USA PICARD Act imposed very heavy sentences, even a life sentence for computer
hackers to go around making these kind of vicious software that goes out and destroys
people's computers.
But it doesn't apply to federal agents.
So this is one more example.
And it's interesting, it's amazing there was so little criticism in the news media
about the ominous aspects of this law, because the news media, well, most of the news media
got through information to the Justice Department, the Justice Department told them not to worry.
But for instance, this is a law that the scope is so much broader than what people realize.
People think, well, it's for terrorists, for the guys that walk around with the Palestinian
headdress and have bombs under their shirts.
No, it's not.
I mean, okay, that's one group of terrorists, but the law is so much more expansive.
For instance, the act defines terrorism as activities involving acts dangerous to human life
that, quote, may appear to be intended to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.
This is different than what the government does.
If the government uses intimidation or coercion,
If the government uses intimidation or coercion, then it's public service, not terrorism.
But this is a very expansive definition of terrorism, and there are a lot of groups that could be swept in under this broad definition.
For instance, and it would only take a few scuffles at a demonstration to have an entire group classified as terrorists.
For instance, if there was a, you know, there's a lot of environmental extremists who have done,
And some of them have actually been charged under existing terrorism statutes, but it'd be possible to classify large groups of them as terrorists, people who are opposed to free trade, or anti-abortion protesters.
Now, and something which is especially ominous here is it'd be possible for the violence at a demonstration to be done by a governed undercover agent.
And it would still qualify that the entire group could be called terrorists because, well, there was violence at their demonstration.
Doesn't matter. It was done by an FBI agent posing.
This happened in the 1960s anti-war demonstrations again and again and again.
The folks who were most violent often turned out to be the government agents.
There's a history of this with the Ku Klux Klan as well.
Now, but it's not only people who go to these kind of demonstrations.
The law now is very strict on people who make donations to these kind of groups.
And say if someone gave a donation to Greenpeace, to Operation Rescue, or the gun owners of America,
and at some point the feds chose to reclassify those groups as terrorist entities.
I mean, certainly the gun owners of America should not be classified that way.
are a peaceful group, but it'd be possible for the feds to reclassify groups under that, under those kind of categories and drop the hammer on them.
Another, it could even happen to church groups.
From the early 80s to the last several years, the Church of Scientology was engaged in a very tough fight with the Internal Revenue Service.
The Internal Revenue Service had been very rough with them and the Scientologists treated the IRS like the IRS treats everybody else.
And, you know, it was kind of fun to watch the sidelines.
And finally, there was a settlement reached and the IRS backed off of some of their harassment of the Scientologists.
But with this law, it would be far easier for the federal government to classify the Scientologists as a terrorist group simply because they had counter-pressured the government in response to the pressure that they had had.
Now, a lot of people are thinking that, okay, well, this is bad, this is bad, you know, the terrorists, terrorists are bad people and maybe it's a little bit expansive.
What people don't realize is that most of the changes to the criminal code that were made by this act don't apply simply to the terrorists.
They apply to anybody who violates any of the 3,000 different federal crimes in the federal statute book.
I mean, this is a law which has changed the concept of due process across the board for people charged with federal crimes.
And it was rushed through with almost no hearings and almost no floor debate.
There was a congressman from New York, Nadler, who's usually very bad on most issues, but he proposed an amendment saying that,
okay, well, let's do this for the terrorists, but let's not make the law apply to everybody else, every other criminal defendant.
But the GOT floor chairman, Ascension Brenner, said, well, it's important to have this, to make it so expansive and broad because perhaps someone who starts out doing one crime might later turn into a terrorist.
I mean, it's fascinating to see the kind of arguments that get respected in Washington.
I mean, it's the kind of thing that sober people should be, you know, laughing, falling on their chairs on.
in Amazon, but somebody says this on the floor of the House of Representatives, and the other congressmen say,
well, yep, sounds good to me. It's sort of like Hey Vern logic. You see these guys, and my sense is that most people watching
Congress are somewhat partially blinded by the idea of, oh, these are congressmen. But if you just think of them as
And if the average human being is talking about what they don't know, I mean, then it's a very different thing.
And especially with a bill like this, the USA Patriot Act, this has profound impact on American's constitutional rights.
It has decimated people's rights in a number of different areas.
And my guess is that a number of provisions in this law will be struck down because they're unconstitutional.
That's my hope.
But it's, you know, congressmen take a solemn oath to obey the Constitution, and there were a number of Democrats who made good arguments against the bill, and the thing came up again and again from the Grand Old Party Conservatives, Grand Old Party Conservatives, was that, well, but it's not our intention to violate the Constitution. It's not, you know, seriously, seriously, you know, they would say, oh, but, you know, but there is nothing in this bill that says it cancels the Fourth Amendment.
Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure.
It doesn't say that in the bill.
Well, you know, since they hadn't read the bill, I guess that they wouldn't matter.
But, yeah, so this is a bill which changes how the government could treat people across the board.
And, you know, it could even impact, well, it could impact almost everything.
It's in some ways much worse than what happened with the RICO Acts and the Asset Forfeiture Acts in the 70s and early 80s.
People thought, okay, RICO is going to beat up the mafia, the asset forfeiture is going to shut down the drug dealers.
Well, that's starting to expand like a mushroom cloud, and now there's over 200 different federal crimes right now,
which the government can come in and confiscate your assets under the Forfeiture Acts, and most of them have nothing to do with drug policy.
It's interesting how Bush has framed his holy war against terrorism, because that's what it's turning into.
to, Bush has made a lot of statements that were very much in favor of liberty, but he
made an early statement last October, Bush said that so long as anybody is terrorizing
established governments, there needs to be a war.
Now this is a different standard than saying that you're going to try and stand up for
liberty in every place, every place all over the world.
But just from his other actions, I'm kind of guessing that as far as his personal conviction
that this statement is closer to his honest belief than the first one about his standing up for liberty every place.
And it's interesting how the war on terrorism has lowered the barriers against the expansion of government power around the globe.
There was a UN resolution shortly after 9-11 which encouraged governments to take anti-terrorism steps.
Steps, and the UN has got a couple thousand pages of reports from governments around the
world which has bragged about what they have done to fight terrorism.
For instance, the government of Cuba, as part of its war on terrorism, has added a new law
that allows the death penalty for anyone who uses the internet to incite violence against
the Cuban government.
It's even better in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe's war on terrorism includes a proposal to make a crime to make any comment critical of President Robert Mugabe.
And it's kind of funny to see what other governments brag about. Syria sent in a response to the UN and bragged that Syria does not give financial support to terrorists.
and it's sure of that because the entire banking system is controlled by the government.
So there is no risk of money going to terrorists.
But this is what the war on terrorism is.
There was a statement by one of the top UN human rights officers.
He said that in some countries, nonviolent activities have been considered as terrorism
and excessive measures have been taken to suppress or restrict individual rights,
including the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair trial, freedom from torture,
The privacy rights and the right to seek asylum, these are all part of the war on terrorism in various places around the country, and certainly our own USA Patriot Act is an example of the government going far too far.
You know, Bush's rhetoric, he's trying to encourage people to think that the terrorism is worse than almost anything else imaginable, that the terrorism is the worst, is the art sin of the universe.
Unfortunately, governments around the world have committed far worse abuses than has the al-Qaeda group or any other terrorist network.
Mass murder was the most memorable achievement of governments in the 20th century.
Some estimates governments killed over 170 million people in various ways.
And by saying that terrorist attacks are the ultimate evil, the war on terrorism implicitly sanctifies whatever governments choose to do to fight terrorism.
But in the long run, most people in this world have a lot more to fear from their own government than they do from foreign terrorists.
But this has been completely forgotten.
And Bush's comments on established governments, it's the kind of thing which you would think the White House would put out an official apology or correction.
But instead he just keeps going on making more and more statements, most of them not as extreme.
It's interesting with Bush how righteous he's been.
It's almost been a change in his face when he speaks in public since last September.
There's so much more arrogance there.
Bush has proclaimed that there is a great moral and ideological divide
on the one side of the U.S. and other anti-terrorism governments,
on the other side the grudges of humanity who must be exterminated, basically.
But it's funny to see how the U.S. government righteousness is a parody of recent history.
Back in 1998, the State Department condemned the Kosovo Liberation Army for its terrorist actions.
In 1999, the U.S. government relabeled them as freedom fighters to help support our bombing campaign against Serbia.
And the Bush administration is still treating the KLA as if they were freedom fighters and not terrorists,
In spite of all the Serbian churches they have blown up in the last two years since the U.S. intervened and gave them control.
Bush got extremely angry about the terrorists who had mailed anthrax to U.S. government buildings.
He cited that as one of the worst examples he could think of of terrorism.
But if you think of what the U.S. government itself is doing in South America,
We are fumigating a part of South America, the northern part, we're going in there, we have poisoned children, we have destroyed legal crops, we have just created great disruption, and we have helped feed a civil war that has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths.
And that is chemical warfare as much as a few packets of anthrax mailed to U.S. government offices.
Another example, Bush in the U.S. has talked about the Al Qaeda, about them using jet liners as weapons, as an example of the apex of depravity.
But for 15 years, the U.S. government supported Jonas Savimbi, who's a rebel leader in Angola, and one of his tactics was to shoot down civilian airliners.
Okay, he didn't hijack them, but still, this is a US ally and he's out there shooting down civilian airliners and that's fine.
Another example of the hypocrisy of the double standard and how Bush judges terrorism and how he judges governments is US foreign aid.
Bush has been very proud that his administration has shut down a number of these Muslim charities.
The standard for evidence, as far as I can tell, is that somebody somewhere has heard a rumor from 1994 or a little bit later, and that's practically it.
In some of these cases, the government has presented no evidence. They have simply said, well, we have reason to suspect.
That's all that's necessary for the government to come in and freeze the assets or to seize them in some cases and just completely destroy the organization.
President Bush was asked in a press conference how much money being funneled to one of these terrorist groups is too much.
Bush said that one dime of money into a terrorist activity is one dime too much.
Bush also declared those who do business with terror will do no business with the U.S. or anywhere else the U.S. can reach.
But the U.S. government itself fails this one-dime test.
If a person has any reasonable concept of terrorism and looks at who's doing the most to brutalize people, it's third world governments around the world.
The U.S. right now is giving more than $10 billion in foreign aid each year to these foreign governments.
Foreign aid is aid from governments to governments for governments.
Almost all of it ends up being controlled by the politicians.
So it doesn't make sense to say, well, but it was for a good cause.
Well, it's too bad it went to the secret police, you know, before it went to the school lunch program.
But that's, I mean, there's very little control of that.
And if you look at some of the countries, the U.S. Bush wants to give $20 million to the government of Uzbekistan this year.
Now, there's some nitpickers at Human Rights Watch.
These nitpickers have complained that the Uzbek government officials have sought to enlighten dissidents with methods such as beating, electric shock, temporary suffocation, hanging by the ankles or wrists, tearing out their fingernails, and punctures with sharp objects. And now this is all being underwritten by your tax dollars. And it's the same with our aid. We're sending troops and other aid to the government of Georgia right now.
And as far as I can tell, from what I read, the governor of Georgia now has an even worse human rights record than the state of Georgia had when Lester Maddox was governor.
I mean, you know, that's not an easy standard to reach, but the former communist henchman achieves that.
And if you look at our foreign aid elsewhere, there's dozens of countries with very bad records.
I mean, there's a flood of U.S. foreign aid going to Middle Eastern governments, Egypt, Israel, Palestinian Authority, they all have very bad human rights records, and it's almost like we're trying to balance out that, well, it's, you know, but it doesn't matter because it's the, there's this fantasy that we're building peace that way by helping pay for, helping underwrite governments throughout the region that have had horrific policies. Something else the U.S. is doing, the U.S. government is the largest
The World Bank will slop out money to almost any government willing to fill out a loan application.
Thanks to that, the World Bank has bankrolled some of the worst atrocities of the last couple decades.
The World Bank financed the forced resettlement of villagers in Tanzania,
the slaughter and resettlement of Ethiopian farmers.
They've paid for a lot of abuses out in Indonesia. Millions of people have had their lives uprooted and ruined thanks to the World Bank and thanks to the U.S. bankrolling of the World Bank.
And yet, for some reason, we're not supposed to think about that when it comes to terrorism.
It's almost as if the Bush administration wants people to think of terrorism as, well, it's not terrorism because the person was wearing a government uniform.
But, you know, that is the ultimate black hole of the entire Bush approach to terrorism.
You can't exempt governments and think you're going to have peace.
But it's funny seeing some of the Bush administration's comments on freedom,
because it's almost as if the Bush administration's affection for freedom is so intense
that it cannot even be questioned without catastrophic consequences.
Attorney General John Ascroft told the Senate a couple of months ago that those who scare
peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty give ammo to America's enemies.
One wonders if the Bush administration of freedom extends to anything beyond a right
to buy an SUV, because obviously, according to Ascroft, free speech is no longer part
of freedom.
And it makes me wonder if Ashcroft got his ideas from Lenin, who said that freedom was
so precious it has to be rationed.
For six months the Bush administration has been pushing things like the USA Patriot Act
and other anti-terrorism measures.
These are going to be Pandora's boxes from which scandal after scandal arise in the coming
years.
The Congress and Congress have given the American people laws and policies that make sense only if no one ever has a good reason to fear their own government.
Unfortunately, terrorists are not the only bad guys in this world.
The President has said that we will use force and bring to justice any state or leader of a state in which terrorists are harbored and trained.
As we all know, the men who perpetrated the 9-11 atrocities were trained in Florida, where the President's brother Jeb is governor, and operated out of New Jersey, where his current EPA head, Christie Todd Whitman, was at the time.
So can we expect to see Jeb and Chrissy Todd Whitman in the gallows next to one another at some time, or a possible invasion of New Jersey and Florida?
The U.S. and the Ashcroft and some other Bush officials have tried to point fingers at Germany, but that's absurd because it was not a plot aimed at Germany, and my impression is there has been some cooperation between the governments, but there were so many incredible failings by the CIA, the FBI, the FAA, the INS, I mean, the whole alphabet agency is there, and it is amazing that the government now has more prestige than it did before 9-11. I mean, government has its biggest group in history,
Could you explain what the Magic Lantern is and its impact on individual freedom?
which the FBI could use to target, send out to targeted computers, targeted users.
There was some controversy with some of the, I believe it was Norton, Norton anti-virus in McAfee.
I think that there were some early indications that the anti-virus producers would work with the government to avoid alerting people,
but there was a huge firestorm over that and the Norton and McAfee quickly clarified that of course they would not do that.
So, but basically what I know and that's what I've read from some wired news and things like that, so, but, I'm sorry, yes?
What does it do, though?
Well, it would be a type of computer virus that would act like other viruses. It would disable your hard drive, basically, and paralyze your computer.
And there are some viruses which, once a person is hit, it transfers their own data to other places, forwards it on, which could be embarrassing, so.
Do you know who wrote the Patriot Act in the land? I suspect it was written before that.
Well, yeah, that's a very good question. It was kind of curious. It was only a few days, I think less than a week, that the Justice Department gave the Congress a 150 or 200 page bill, you know, abracadabra.
Okay, the final bill. Okay, I'm not sure how long the Justice Department's initial bill was, but it was full of provisions that the Justice Department had tried to get Congress to enact over the last four or five years during the Clinton administration and now under Bush, and it was like all these things were sitting on the shelf and all of a sudden the Justice Department says, oh boy, there's a sale.
Which is basically how Congress reacted. They said, okay, fine, good with us, you know.
I mean, it was amazing how there were so few congressmen who took a stand.
Well, so few GOP congressmen. Ron Paul was very good.
Butch Otter from Idaho, who I'd never heard of, gave a very nice speech on this.
And there were a handful of Democrats that were good, but they're the same folks who are usually bad on most issues.
and Civil Liberties. The Democrats in the House tend to be better.
And Russ Feingold, to his honor, was the only Senator who stood up and said no to the Patriot Act.
Editorially, the news coverage in both papers was not good.
was not good prior to the bills being enacted, but what happened is that after Bush signed
the bills, I think both papers started to have a little more analysis of what was in
them, and they said, gee, this sounds bad. But for some reason, it really wasn't there
in force before the bills were signed. There were some good editorial columns. I think
the New York Times is probably stronger. New York Times tends to be one of the best papers
on civil liberties in the country, much better than the Washington Post.
And conservative papers like the Washington Times were just, you know, totally pro-Bush,
so you know, totally gone.
Having been wand down at the airport and had all my pockets empty by after being pulled out of line, after a six-year-old woman had been pulled out of line and given a shakedown, all the things you compare about highlighting civil liberties, those things you point out are even greater concern to me.
But I take it that your concerns with the violation of civil liberties are apart from or conjoined with our response to terrorism in the 2800 B.C. along with the real and the live as we respond to or claim talent.
So is it an opposition to pursuing Taliban or al-Qaeda in that kind of stance or is it separate from in terms of this being used as a cover for an overextension violation of civil liberties?
Well, first of all, I'm in favor of wiping out this terrorist network that did the attack.
I mean, it was a severe act of aggression, and my sense is the U.S. is entitled to add for that group and to put them out of business, lock, stock and barrel, by practically any means necessary.
It's a different question if you're talking about the Taliban, because the Taliban did not attack New York, the Taliban did not attack the Pentagon.
So, but if the Taliban was working to protect the al-Qaeda network, they've put themselves at least to a degree in the crossfire.
But the thing I'm concerned about is that there's a sentiment on, there's a very false sense of security which is coming from all the BS in the airports.
I mean, I was flying out of National Airport Thursday and they were very, you know, they made a very big point that no one can go to the bathroom in the first half hour of the flight after we leave or else the fighter jets are going to come up and the air marshals will pull out their guns and the plane will be forced to land at the nearest airport, which has happened with some planes coming out of the National because they have this idiot rule about, you know, if someone gets up in the first half hour they say, oh my God, hijacking. No, it might be an old lady going to the bathroom.
matter. I mean, it's almost like they are trying to make it institutional to have hysterical
responses. And, you know, the thing that really aggravates me in this airport security, well,
you know, someone, well, yeah, there's, it's foolish how they're playing games in airport
security. It's kind of PC games in one sense. But the biggest aggravation is they're hassling
the heck out of everybody. And, you know, it's simple to government to assume that,
Well, you know, people don't have anything to do with their lives.
It's fine to make them go to the airport two hours ahead of a flight.
You know, it's nice to be able to sit there and watch, listen to CNN news blaring.
I mean, it's a complete waste of time.
It's just pissing away people's lives.
And, but it doesn't cost the government anything.
So the government doesn't hesitate to impose these heavy costs.
It's the same with the East, the old East block.
It didn't cost the Soviets anything to have people stand in line for three hours for potatoes.
And it's the same with, you know, all this time wasted for the airports, but the transportation sector is very adamant that he does not want pilots to have guns.
And guns by the pilots would be a much better, would be a very, it would not be a panacea.
And it's possible some pilots might misuse them, but it'd be a hell of a lot more effective than these gumbos at the airport.
Report, just kind of like you, okay, did somebody give you a bomb? No. Okay. I mean, this, you know, this is what they're really asking. I mean, but, I mean, most of them are just kind of look like they, most of them look like they spent too many years in federal job training programs. That's the nicest way to put it.
I know it's hard to step back in the heat of everything that's going on, but we know that government has grown the biggest in crises like World War I and World War II.
Could you give us some idea of maybe how we're going to be seeing this 10 or 20 years from now, assuming that it gets no worse?
Can you put it in context with the government growth of those other episodes perhaps? Is it as big as them?
Well, I think Robert Higgs might be able to do that better than I could as far as he's got a better historical grasp on that.
This is only six months in. It's hard to tell where it's going to go. If there's another attack, it doesn't matter if it's going to be because of a government screw-up.
I'm sure there'll be a new wave of laws, a new wave of confiscations, a new wave of decimating rights and liberties.
I don't know what's going to happen over the next six or eight months.
I guess it depends on whether or not people start to wake up.
Whether people start saying, well, it was the government that screwed up, and yet we've given the government all this new money and all this new power,
and we have all these new people at the airport, but gee, the planes still got hijacked.
I mean, you know, it's challenging to try to find a way to break through the mental stupor of the average American.
Because the average American is just, you know, there's a lot of very, very intelligent people out there that have put their brains on automatic pilot on this entire issue.
And if something can happen that will get maybe 10% of the population or 15% to start to use their natural intelligence on this
on this, and start to just try to reason through some of this stuff, or to sit and compare
some of Bush's statements, like his pledge to stand up and fight for liberty everywhere
at the same time he's promising to stand up for all established governments. I mean,
I guess I haven't given up hope that common sense could break out yet, so that's going
I'm going to determine it, I think.
Do you comment, I think, well, come on this is, Warren Brooks, the late Warren Brooks, once wrote in a quill that it seems that the role of the press is not to protect the status quo, as they said, but to state its quo.
Sure, sure.
And I want you to comment on that.
Well, it's been surprising that most of the press corps has jumped on the big government bandwagon, but it's been that way since about 1933 in many ways.
Some journalists have done some excellent work on this. The LA Times' William Orham out there has done some excellent work.
Some of the people that write for the front page of the Wall Street Journal have done some good work.
and there's been some good stuff in the New York Times even, so, but by and large, it's just the, it's almost as if the critical faculties have been suspended, but it's not isolated the war on terrorism, it's the same with the campaign finance reform.
I mean, it's amazing that the most respected media outlets, print and broadcast both, have been so enthusiastic on the campaign finance former bill, which just overtly tries to destroy the First Amendment and make it a federal crime to criticize congressmen 60 days before their re-election.
You would think that that fact might be mentioned a little more prominently in some of the news stories about the campaign finance bills, but it isn't.
I mean, it's just, but my sense was that for some of the Washington Press Corps, I think that some of them get a lot of their status from Washington, per se, that they're, you know, it's almost like they're, like being an ambassador to another country, or to the Vatican, I mean, and so, and it's important that, it's important that for some of them, that Washington not be a total laughing stock,
because that would undercut the prestige of their job.
So, and, but for many of them, it's not,
there's nothing devious about it.
They're just pro, they're left-wing, liberal,
and they like big government and they don't,
and they don't ask many questions, so.
But at the same time, you're always talking about civil liberties. Isn't it the state?
I mean, there's a reason press...
Normal reporters seem to believe that private organizations are depending on others against civil liberties,
and government never violates civil liberties.
America is a conservative administration.
Well, yeah, I mean, certainly there's...
I think that the Washington press would be more likely to criticize, as time goes on, the Bush administration for civil liberties violations.
Violations. I mean, it was amazing that the Washington media did very little on the Clinton
administration civil liberties records. Clinton had an incredibly bad civil liberties record,
but he was just kind of the folks of the Washington Post, you know, tried to outdo Michael Lewinsky
on the coverage. I mean, it was amazing. There was even a book by two Washington Post reporters,
The other prominent report is something about the history of the Justice Department, a description of Maine Justice, Justice Department headquarters, and it was the subtitle was something about the men and women who helped save our liberties.
And I'm saying, now wait a minute, okay, and this is after Waco.
You know, I mean, but Waco never existed in Washington, D.C., except for a tiny, small number of folks.
I mean, even the Washington think tanks almost never dealt with it until seven or eight years later.
I mean, it was an issue that people just would not raise in polite society.
And I think you're seeing the same mentality that, well, you know, it's too bad the government's going to be doing the wiretapping
and the sneak and peek and all this stuff, but it's probably just going to be Arabs or Muslims or riff-raff
I wondered if you could confirm the following allegation. On September 11th, it was perfectly legal to bring any knight on board that was no longer in a foreign place.
The reason the terrorists succeeded on 9-11 was because the FAA preaches that people should not resist.
It was FAA doctrine that the pilots should just kind of, you know, okay, yes sir, yes sir, okay, go and take over.
And especially after what we found out in the Philippines in 95 and from other Arab terrorist groups
talking about doing a French hijacking to plow into some place in Paris.
The information was there that the terrorists were attempting to use planes as weapons.
But the FAA never processed that, never mentioned it to the pilots,
and it was still FAA policy that people were just kind of, people weren't supposed to submit.
So, I mean, that's horrendous.
Jim, I don't think the terrorists attacked the World Trade Center because they don't like our Republican-formal government or the fact that many of us drive SUVs. I think they attacked us because they hate us. And I'm just wondering, is there anything the United States government can do to be a little less hated in the world?
No, seriously, I mean, this was the theme of his first speech to Congress, I believe it was September 20th.
He was talking about that, and it's come up again, and it's something which even some libertarians have bought into.
Okay, fine, thank you. Thank you for the clarification.
Yeah, and it's just, and I, you know, it's certainly possible that some terrorists are very upset about the First Amendment.
I don't think that's what's driving them, you know.
There was a statement I believe that Osama bin Laden made shortly, either before or shortly
after 9-11, which he listed three things, which had upset him.
He was very upset about the embargo on Iraq, which according to some Arabs, I guess, maybe
perhaps the UN as well, has resulted in the death of over half a million Iraqi babies
and Children. Because we have wrecked their economy in a number of ways with the bombing.
We prevent them from being able to rebuild. And, you know, some Arabs get angry about
that. I mean, based on those assumptions. I mean, a second thing which upsets them is
the U.S. military bases on Muslim holy lands. I mean, we have a number of bases in Saudi
Arabia and other areas that are very sacred to Muslims. I mean, some Americans might say,
Well, but it shouldn't be sacred to Muslims. That's not the question.
I mean, my understanding was that the first Bush administration had promised that those bases would only be temporary during the Gulf War.
However, we've stayed there forever. We're trying to stay there forever, and that's generated a great deal of animosity.
The third thing that they've said was that the U.S. siding with Israel and the Palestinians on the fight with the Palestinians.
for Palestinians and that's obviously that's going to be something that's going to create, make a lot of Arabs very angry.
Oh, yeah. I was just mentioning that there's a comment about Bush that there's a terrible
standard of freedom. Is that so that obviously it gave you an apology of a reason?
Very good. Good. Good line. Good line. Well, something which has been funny is that Bush
Bruce has been using this line about, well, we have to do this or else the terrorists will win.
And it's almost become like an unconscious mental reflex.
He was talking a couple weeks ago about expanding the Peace Corps.
And he said, we have to do this kind of stuff to help send the American allies abroad or else the terrorists will win.
And I'm thinking, okay, I don't recall Osama mentioning the Peace Corps.
And I really don't think that the Peace Corps is going to be that much of a threat to anybody abroad except for, no, I'll try to be polite. I'll try to keep this in a high tone. It's a struggle.
Going once, going twice.
Well, it wasn't going to war. It was the first resolution by Congress to authorize force. It was quite expansive, but yeah, okay.
Paul voted in favor of it. And Paul put out a statement on that. It was a well-reasoned statement. I mean, it wasn't like he was double-crossing his principles or anything like that.
I mean, he had a coherent explanation for supporting that resolution, which I thought made pretty good sense.
I mean, it was kind of, one would have liked to have a narrower resolution instead of making George Bush emperor or Caesar.
I don't recall, I think, I'm sure that that would be on his website.
It's certainly been sought out, but Ron Paul has done some of the best criticism of the USA Patriot Act.
He's done wonderful work as far as the impact on financial privacy, so-called money laundering, bank secrecy.
Paul's staff has done some very good work, and he's done as much as anybody to hold the principal ground.
Bob Barr has made some very good criticisms as well.
Well, he's a very sharp former federal attorney, but Barr voted for the Patriot Act.
So that's kind of puzzling.
The congressional resolutions that Paul voted for were limited to use the force against those that conducted the attacks.
Yeah, okay. That's a very good, yeah. That helps explain why Paul would support it. Thanks.
I think we know a lot about one of the terrorists, Adam, and it seems that it's also going to black out some of the other, I'm just wondering what you think about that, why we don't know a lot, why the American press is shut out of looking at some of the other issues of the terrorists?
and Ashcroft even has totally reinterpreted the Freedom of Information Act to greatly narrow the amount of information on any government agency that's going to be made public.
And there's been a few little bleats in the media, but that's it.
I don't know, but there are so many things that have not been made public, like I think the flight recorder and a lot of the information from the Flight 93,
as well as some of the other information on some of the hijacking situations.
I mean, and I have not noticed the federal government to ever withhold information that
made itself look good. And so, I don't know what you're up to, but, and it's certainly
possible that foreign policy considerations are the reason for withholding the information
I agree with about 99% of everything you've said. I think you've done really well. You're on two things. I have a question about the embargo on Iraq. My understanding is that the situation they're at as far as children starting to go to work is very likely the fault of the regime, which is still using substantial sums of money to finance weapons.
Well, that's a good question. It's the whole policy of the embargo was to try and induce a lot of pain on the entire country of Iraq to help encourage the people there to overthrow the government.
Well, it's been, what, 12 years? 10, 11, 12 years? It hasn't worked. And certainly, I think that the government is, I'm sure it's using some of the revenue it gets with evil intent. Governments have a tendency to do that.
But I also think that the humanitarian situation would be far better there if the UN embargo was not there.
But part of what drives this, trying to understand the Arab and Muslim rage, is the perception out there that these embargoes have resulted in that many fatalities, and it was something that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked about, I believe in 1996, and she had a quick comment about, well, if that's the price of getting Saddam out of power, that's how it is, or something like that. I mean, Madeleine Albright did not challenge that.
I've seen some good writing on it. I'm not investigated myself. I would be happy to see Saddam Hussein. It's always a tragedy if a tyrant dies a natural death.
And if some Iraqi citizen wants to take out Saddam Hussein, fine. But I think it would be a very bad idea for the U.S. to go in there and basically take responsibility of the situation, which is what we would do if we overthrew the government. It certainly worked out great in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Why not some more?
The ACLU has done some great work. The ACLU was one of the best sources of information on this. They were very courageous. They had more courage than almost anybody else in Washington on the Patriot Act, except for some of the, well no, they were way out there in front on the Patriot Act, and they've been a very good source of information. The President, Nadine Strousen, gave us some very good speeches.
Mises, some of their policy folks have testified before Congress and really taken a hard line,
so they've really upheld the flag.
Amnesty, I believe, and Human Rights Watch have done a little bit of stuff that's good.
They certainly haven't, they certainly haven't kowtowed, and it's possible that they've also
done a lot of good stuff, but I'm just not aware of it, so.
How can you be useful? Is he respected and what's your opinion?
I think he's made some, I would agree with some of his criticisms, I'm not sure how, I would hesitate to, okay, fine, fine, there's, well, okay, there are questions about his affiliations with the Communist Party, from Dr. Hamaway here.
I mean, you know, he's someone who's been very good on some issues, but I guess I, there's some folks even, well, it's not something which I've looked into.
I mean, I think other people here could comment more thoughtfully on that.
So, Mr. Chomsky is one of the smaller churches that have people who think he's had a good
time in the Senate, and he's working with the opposition, and he's certainly working
with the M.K.A. and the M.K.A. for the legislation that has been passed.
He's one of the economic people who think he's had a good time in the Senate, and he's
a good representative of the M.K.A.
He is condemned by the establishment left.
But he is someone who does get air time. Maybe so. I haven't tracked him over the decades.
This is a different universe, indeed.
Mr. Bowman, I know that you take a slightly different view about foreign policy than I do in general, but we have been attacked.
And what would be your suggestions on how not to infringe upon American civil liberties, yet go about seeing that these bad guys get what they deserve?
Well, the first thing I would have done is, you know, you know, Bush likes to ask him, says he asks himself sometimes, what would Jesus do, you know?
And it would have been interesting as far as asking after September 11th, what would Stalin do?
And it would have been interesting to see the head of the FAA, the Transportation Department, a lot of these other federal agencies that screwed up massively and have responsibility for, well, that screwed up so badly and made it easier for terrorists to succeed in killing thousands of Americans, those people should have been held responsible, those people should have been held very responsible.
And that's one thing I would have done. I mean, a major part of the trouble is that the government is doing all these different things at this point.
We've got over 2 million people in prison. We've made so many activities criminal.
The thing I would suggest is to get rid of most of the criminal statute book, to concentrate on things that are actually violent crimes, violent threats, and focus law enforcement resources.
The federal government is already far too big, part of the reason that it was so incompetent before 9-11 was that it was trying to track so many different things.
There was a wonderful statement by the former head of the INS, Dora Meisner, I believe, Doris Meisner, I think that's how it's pronounced.
She was asked about some of these names being on watch lists, an INS watch list.
And she said, but we've got millions of names on those lists.
Well, that's a problem. That's a problem, you know. Okay, you know, there's a very small number of people, well, a very small number of people who are known to be involved with these extreme, hardcore terrorist groups.
And if you kind of mix their names in with 500,000 other people who might have underpaid their taxes in Belgium, you know, well, that's a problem. That's a real loss of priorities.
The government's got to get its priorities right, and the government was created to protect rights, including people's personal safety, right to property, things like that.
But the government has become far more concerned with controlling people than with protecting them.
So I would just say that they need to completely change the focus of what the government does.
Two points. First, the authoritarianism abroad doesn't recognize American power in the anti-constitutional policy, and the anti-constitutional policy still mitigates the authoritarianism abroad.
Point two, of course America should set up a religious party, in general, that would subsidize the Israel, as we do sure to tell you, from Baruch here in Egypt.
But I'm not at all convinced that cutting off a subsidy to Israel would somehow pacify the Arab world.
Bear in mind, once you cut off aid, American Zionists and other individuals with the freedom to subsidize Israel on their own.
Right. Well, on the second one, that's not what I was saying. Well, I was certainly not implying that ending U.S. foreign aid to Egypt, Israel, and the Palestinian
Policy and Authority is going to create peace in the Middle East.
I mean, that is something that the people there have to do.
And it's a tragic situation.
There's lots of good people on both sides of that conflict.
Unfortunately, there's also a lot of, you know, hardliners, I guess,
who are driving policy on both sides to a certain degree.
But I think it's a fantasy to think that the U.S. government can somehow
crack the whip and make both sides all of a sudden love peace.
I mean, it's hard for me to think of anything the U.S. government has even come close to achieving in the Middle East since, was it 1978 when Sadat and Begin were Camp David?
I mean, and basically, that's something that probably wouldn't have happened even without Camp David, because the leader of Egypt wanted peace, and the Israeli leader also was willing to work for peace.
And no amount of American money or military goods can substitute for that. So, anyhow.
In your view, how should the U.S. react to the process of weapons of mass destruction being developed by gangster regimes like the United States?
Well, certainly a certain amount of, it certainly should be gathering information in various ways, paying attention to it.
It seems that the Bush administration thinks that only U.S. allies should be allowed to have nuclear bombs.
That's the only sense which I can make of their moral doctrine, which they state with such fervor.
But certainly, I think there's a lot of things the U.S. government could do to maybe keep an eye on what's happening.
and what's happening, but according to Scott Ritter, the former UN inspecting, one of the top inspectors there for the UN,
I mean, there wasn't that much evidence of the Iraqis trying to develop weapons of mass destruction even before the US,
before the UN guys were kicked out, so, I mean, it's an evil government.
There are a lot of evil governments in the world, and I'd certainly keep an eye on them,
I think the chance of the Iraqis being able to threaten the U.S. with a nuclear bomb are very, very low.
This is nothing.
No, no, I'm saying keep a close eye on them.
Excuse me, you keep a close eye and you see they're doing it. What are you doing?
Could you solve these problems right here?
Right here. Yeah, right. Right. Well, I'm sorry I forgot to bring my magic wand. Well, I mean, that's something which would, that's a question that would come up if there was strong evidence, but I mean, it's hard to hypothetical here, but I also think that even if the Iraqis had one or two or three such bombs,
that they would not have a wish for natural suicide and I think both that the US and the
I think if the Saddam Hussein would know if he tried to attack the US with a
nuclear bomb he get blown to pieces by the US and if he tried to attack Israel
with a nuclear bomb the Israelis would blow up the pieces so I really don't see
you know we're gonna assume that there's a suicide wish there then that's it's
I think it's hard to make a rational response to that.