Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/18/24 Andrew Cockburn on the True National Security Budget and the Plight of Julian Assange

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

Scott interviewed Andrew Cockburn about some recent articles he’s written. They start with a piece digging into the actual national security budget, which is much higher than people typically think. They also talk about the consequences of the war on terror, Julian Assange, the threat of government censorship and more. Discussed on the show: “Our Real National Security Budget” (Substack) “The Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Problem” (Harper’s) Andrew Cockburn is the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine and the author of The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine and Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins. Follow him on Twitter @andrewmcockburn. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already, time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more the 5,500 interviews since 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up to the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line next i've got the great andrew coburn he is the author of a great many books including his most recent the spoils of war and he is the washington editor of harper's magazine And if I can find the right link here, it is spoils of war.substack.com, where he has this incredible recent piece, a real national security budget. Two trillion here we come. Welcome back to the show. Andrew, how are you doing?

Oh, great to be with you. I'm pretty good, pretty good. Good. Very happy to have you on the show here. Before I start asking you questions about this great article slash interview. of Winslow Wheeler that you have here. I wanted to thank you for granting your Pierre Spray Award to the great Dave DeCamp at anti-war.com. I think that's really great that you guys recognized his great work there. Oh, I guess he got second place after the great Max Blumenthal. But still.

Yeah. Oh, no, we were so happy to do that. I mean, we're so impressed with what Dave puts out. I mean, amazing quantity and always high-quality. tells you what need to know. I mean, I said at the ceremony, you know, I said, well, start your day with anti-war.com. Then if you feel like it, follow up with the trashy old legacy media. Yeah, absolutely right there. Well, and I think that's great. And of course, I am the world's largest and biggest and greatest Gareth Porter fan. And so I'm very happy to see that he

won the runner-up prize as well and of course the great Max Blumenthal who got first place he didn't work for me but and he's not my greatest friend like Gareth Porter but I love the guy I've interviewed him a hundred times and he has done such great work this year

especially debunking the Israelis narratives about October the 7th and so forth so he absolutely deserved to win first place there and very happy to see that as well yeah cool man it's nice when there's something nice to talk about, Andrew. You know what I mean?

It doesn't happen that often these days, but we should seize the opportunity when we can. Seriously. All right. So everybody knows that the National Defense budget is only $800-something billion a year. So what's with this crazy headline of yours here? Well, you know, that they're very careful to, I mean, the number is still obscenely large, but they're sort of careful to leave out all sorts of very relevant national security activities. And as we try to point out, that the real number, if you count in, you know, everything that your dollar and taxpayer dollar and mine goes to, for the cause of national security, we're heading towards two trillion. I mean, we're in 17.1 trillion.767 right now and rising sharply. Amazing. So help walk us through this. How do we get from $800 billion to almost another trillion on top of that?

Well, the problem is that they, you know, as I say, they leave out a lot of stuff. Things like the amount we spend on nuclear weapons, you know, nuclear warheads, the bombs, the newer bombs, the bigger bombs, the smaller bombs. And that funneled through the Department of Energy, and that comes to $37 billion, not a small sum. Then there's, well, like $26 billion for military pensions and health care, which is, you know, again, If we, you know, very, obviously, very pertinely part of it, another 12 billion for the selective service operation. And then as, you know, as Winslow Wheeler points out, there's something very mysterious. There's a suspicious looking category for the international activities, the FBI, which

they refuse to tell us what that is. It's just lumped under defense-related activities. So, and then I, you know, they're going. on down the list. There's a huge chunk for the money we pay to, you know, the interest on the debt for the money, the debt that we borrowed, the money we borrowed to finance all this in the first place. So that comes to $254 billion. So once you start adding it all up, you're, as I say, we're heading for $2 trillion. Yeah, it's amazing. And then, of course, there's also, as you guys talk about in the piece here, you and Winslow Wheeler, you have this kind of separate war budget. So

if we give billions of dollars to Israel, to Ukraine, to Taiwan, to whoever, that doesn't get counted in the original defense budget, right? Right. That's where they, you know, they've announced this budget. And then what's going to happen is they'll tack on things, as needs to be for Israel, for Ukraine, for Taiwan, for something called the defense industrial base, which is a lot of money handed out to corporations to build, to build plants, to, you know, step up production facilities for artillery shells or whatever. So, you know, they've been able to present this year. They say, oh, look, we're spending less this year.

We're projected to spend less, actually for next year, which is the budget we're talking. about than we did this year. But that's only, that's just slight of hand because by the time they've tossed in all these other ingredients, it'll be higher. Yeah. And of course, killing Somalis is expensive. They've been doing that since 2001. Lord knows the total spent on killing those poor people, but there's a war that has no end in sight. That's right. And then the, you know, the ongoing wars in the Sahel, in the Sahara region. You'll note we've just been

kicked out of Niger, where we had a huge drone base, which we spent $100 million on. And now we're proposing to instead shift to other places like Ghana along the West African coast because we've got to keep

those drones flying. Yeah. I wouldn't able to reach but Nick Turs had a piece recently about how terrorism in northern and western Africa has increased some thousands of percent since the war on terrorism there, especially we all know. It was Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's mass murder of the Libyans in 2011 that really kicked it all off there. So, the jihadists then who they sided with, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and Ansar al-Sharia and the others then spread down into Mali and made their alliance with Boko Haram in Nigeria and God knows what. Yeah, you know, it's, I'm so glad you, you know, Nick Turs is just fantastic in sort of covering that part of the world, which most, you're hard to find, you know, that kind of reporting anywhere else. And, you know, we often hear about, well, it's often said, you know, rightly that, you know, that Iraq, the invasion of Iraq was the greatest strategic blunder of the recent decades. But more I think about it, you know, the casual destruction of liberal.

really is up there with for reasons you've just said, you know, it's really kicked off something that's causing the whole of northwestern Africa to, you know, to spin into a jihadist night pair. Yeah. Well, hey, it's good for business if you're in the business of spreading conflicts and then promising to clean them up and spreading them further, which is the racket, it right the self-licking ice cream cone well that's right um you know and as as you say it's great for business um you know pierce spray who we honored at the you know that that that award with we were you were talking about for for max and gareth and dave he always one of his many wise sayings was that the u.s government has two functions to buy arms at home and sell arms abroad

You know, and the war on terror continues to be the gift that keeps on giving in that regard. Yeah. You know, hadn't it been amazing just in the last even half a year to see how, I mean, they must have decided this at some White House meeting or something, right, that they are going to go ahead and put subsidies for the military industrial complex as one of the top publicly stated reasons for intervening in the Ukraine and Russia war. I know. I mean, you could make this. We could have come to that conclusion ourselves. In fact, we have. But the fact that they actually boast about it, you know, shows how sort of clunky they are that Blinken and, you know, Biden himself, you know, say, oh, most of this money, the money for Ukraine is really going to be spent here. So, you know, it's, you know, it's, we're giving it to you, giving it to the, you know, I'm going to. i.e. the military industrial complex. We're out of excuses. Here's a bribe. Yeah, right. Please believe that you are somehow going to benefit from us cashing a check for Raytheon here, even if you don't work for Raytheon. Somehow this benefits you.

Just close your eyes real tight and believe it. Yeah, yeah. It's astonishing, really. I mean, the sort of mutton-headed brazenness of this is, At least in the old days, he used to pretend it was for, you know, I don't know, democracy or something. And now just to sort of openly state, you know, that this is a bribe. This is a bribe to our corporate pals with maybe a few jobs thrown in on the side. It's just amazing. Yeah.

And, geez, think of all the doctors and nurses getting paid to take care of the permanently maimed and warehouse. in Walter Reed and the other military hospitals, Andrew. There's a great stimulus for your city, huh? Well, that's right, yeah. I mean, you know, and, you know, Veterans Affairs, by the way, that's $800 billion in the budget we were just talking about. So, you know, we just to look after the people who've been, who've been part of this, you know, the endless war,

I mean, that's a huge item in the budget that we, and particularly the poor people who've men and women who've been maimed in the process and who are sitting there lingering in Walter Reed and other other establishments like that. Yeah, I mean, they really are out of sight, out of mind. Nobody talks about them. Everybody wants to pretend the terror war never happened now, I guess. And so all those guys that got their legs blown off and worse, you know, maimed. And it's a great, you know, benefit. It's wonderful that Battlefield medicine has advanced so much that so many of these guys' lives were saved when they otherwise would have died out there in the field. At the same time, you know, the dark lining on that bright cloud is the massive expense of them being forced to live the rest of their miserable lives in bed in the hospital.

Maybe for decades. Yeah. It's horrible. Um, and you know, they there has to be, you know, the, their relatives, you know, I, I know this from someone who's directly involved in helping them. I mean, the people come in from, um, you know, their families come from around the country to visit their, you know, alien, you know, the wounded relative father, brother, son, um, in Walter Reed. Um, and it has to be private. They, depends. on private charity for their sustenance, you know, it's like, I think if we're going to spend eight hundred, among that money, we should at least be looking after the families of these people too. Right.

Yeah, they're going to have their Ronald McDonald house, put them up for the weekend or whatever. I wonder when was the last time George W. Bush visited Walter Reed or Barack Hussein Obama. I bet never. A great question. I've never seen any sign that they ever have. Yeah, no, they don't care at all. about those people not one bit Bush sort of he started

painting he took up painting in his old age and has taken it up and he's painted he was painting wounded veterans which I thought was kind of in a way kind of kind of weird or kind of sick in a way I mean he gets all these four people

maimed and then he you know gets to paint their picture yeah and then I think you know they must screen the guys too when he does meet with them or has in the past met with them. It's always some guy who's very happy to have a chance to go and take a walk or ride a bike with W. Bush. It's never a veteran who in any way regrets the sacrifice that he was tricked into making there in the name of defending this country. And it's always like, oh, geez, I got to hang out with W. Bush for the day. That was nice.

Right. As opposed to I had the opportunity to punch W. Bush in the nose. Yeah, or even just tell him, hey, man, what you did, the lies you told, the sacrifices me and my buddies were forced to make, you know, nothing like that. He's never confronted with that ever, you know? No, no, and, you know, it's all fading for memory. I mean, all that disaster. And as we just said, they were just discussing the, you know, the ongoing disaster, or among the other ongoing disasters, you know, the whole Libyan. I mean, the Libyan tragedy, what they did there, which has, you know, has had the ramifications that are just extraordinary and horrible. Well, and the entire terror war, the cost was borrowed.

I mean, the money that wasn't just, you know, printed up and, you know, stolen from us through inflation. They borrowed it from China and Korea and Japan. And so we got to pay interest on that debt forever. I mean, the way I look at it, I think I saw that, you know, it's more than a trillion dollars a year, just an interest on the debt right now. So the way I look at, that's every cent I've ever paid to the IRS ever, has just gone to pay interest on the debt to some foreign sovereign central bank that, of course, also printed the money to buy the American securities in the first place. And it's just all of our wealth. Just think about all the money that you have paid in the income tax that you otherwise would have spent improving the life of your family. that they just piss away on this violence and then that just the interest on the debt for the

violence it's just sickening well yes um it is and there's no you know as we as i discussed in that uh interview with uh with winslow wheeler you know that there's no um there's no dissent on this in in the Congress. I mean, you and I and, you know, millions of people in this country do think it is sick, it's disgusting. But they, you know, there's just just a wave through the Congress. And an important part of the thing to understand is the Congress now is so tightly controlled by the party leadership by, you know, Schumer and McConnell in the Senate and Johnson and the House, but certainly in the Senate, you can't, if you're a senator and you say, hey, I don't think we should be spending money.

You know, I'm going to introduce an amendment to say we should not give any more money for killing Somalis or whatever. That amendment doesn't go anywhere unless Schumer decides, or McConnell, decides it can be brought to the floor. There's absolutely no possibility anymore for real debate in the Senate unless, well, particularly Schumer, decides it should be so. So, you know, democracy has been really eroded there. Yeah.

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and our managing editor, Keith Knight's domestic imperialism. And we've got more great titles coming in 2024. Check them out at Libertarian Institute.org slash books and help support our anti-government efforts at Libertarian Institute.org slash donate. And thank you. Hey, y'all, Scott here. Let me tell you about Roberts and Roberts, Brokerage, Inc.

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I thought, fine, then give me. back my half a trillion dollars you stole and kill those people with your own bombs and ammunition and leave my country out of your deadly sin. How about that? Well, yeah. I mean, it was, you know, it was what you'd expect from Netanyahu and the Likud. But I thought the Schumer speech, you know, it was what you see to me it was really designed to do was to present a sort of, um, a little, a few excuses for the, for, to Democratic voters who are going to desert the party because of Gaza to say, it's another effort to sort of say, um, a big leaf to say, hey, we're really, you know, we're standing up for the Palestinians too. We're criticizing Netanyahu.

You know, we're trying to, we really want to put in humanitarian aid to Gaza, you know, But in reality, why we still send all the bombs and bombs and shells in ammunition to kill more Palestinians. It's all part of this PR drive that's going on right now to somehow persuade all those Democrats who are going to not vote in November or somehow vote against Biden that, hey, you know, we're not really as bad as it looks and we're trying to do something about the genocide, which they're not. Yeah. Man, I remember reading this thing. You guys mentioned the submarines in here. And I think it was Greg Pallist about 10 years ago had a thing. I forgot the exact total. Maybe they were charging $10 billion for each sub. But they had ordered 20 subs. And then they cut the order to 10. But then they just doubled the price of each sub. So they got the same amount of money for half the amount of submarines. Yeah. By the way, let's hear it for the submarine service, you know, that they've now run the cost of a Columbia, the new missile sub, the Columbia class. It now costs more than an aircraft carrier. I mean, it's a pretty significant achievement to actually have a submarine cost more than an aircraft carrier with thousands of sailors on board and, you know, huge complex systems. And a submarine's pretty good. Bissell sub is pretty complicated too. But I've just, that's real, a real budgetary triumph. And they should be recognized for their achievement. Yeah. Well, and I don't know if this really goes without saying, but all this wealth, I mean,

you know, as we're talking about before, they spin this as, you know, a benefit for your county or whatever. All this comes from us in the first place, to our taxes, the price we pay through the penalty of inflation, the interest on the debt that we have to pay when they borrow from China to, you know, attack Afghanistan or whatever crazy thing to build up Taiwan. All this comes at our expense. And if we just abolish the empire, we would all be so much wealthier. They act like, oh, America's American industry would just fall apart if it wasn't for all this welfare. But this is all at the expense of the productive economy. economy. Well, that's right. And it's a, it's a sign of how so hollowed out in a way the

economy is. I just had a piece in, um, in Harper's, uh, about how Silicon Valley is sort of becoming ever more title, entering into an ever more close embrace with the military industrial complex. You know, Silicon Valley, which, you know, used to be, you know, thought of us, you know, hey, part of a sort of techno counterculture, you know, the personal computer liberated us and so forth. And really now more and more, sort of the whole impetus in the tech industry is towards defense contracts. And that's a sign to me that really they run out of ideas for sort of civilian innovation, for, you know, ways to not be part of the military industrial complex. So it's just like, you know, once upon a time, the U.S. machine tool industry dominated the world and it was incredibly productive and efficient and paid high wages and had very good cost control and so forth.

And then they discovered the defense dollar and, you know, got fat on defense contracts. And but in the meantime, the Germans and the Japanese and maybe ultimate of the Chinese and maybe ultimate of the China. Chinese, you know, they were, they were starting to produce better machine tools, you know, better priced and, you know, more productively produced. And so that basically the arm machine tool industry sort of fell gradually more and more by the wayside. It's just, you know, as we are sort of manufacturing capabilities wither away, you know, that they turn to just leaching off, well, as you say, you and me in the end. you know, government contracts. And that's what's happening with tech, too, I think. And then they point their finger at China and go,

oh, they're Chinese. They're undermining us. They're our enemy. And it's like, yeah, you blew our brains out. Thanks a lot, guys. Yeah. You know? Exactly. Exactly.

Oh, God. Yeah, man. So, you know, I'm real short on time here today, but I wanted to give you a chance to mention Julian Assange. I know you've written quite a bit about this. And, of course, he's up against the wall right. now. We're waiting to find out, I think, the final ruling on whether he'll be extradited to the United States to be locked in a dungeon next to Ramsey Yousef, who actually deserves to be there

in this supermax in Florence, Colorado. So I was wondering, you know what, I'm sure this is something that you come up against from time to time as well, that as time goes on, you have all new audiences coming in, people who were too young before, or they were on the other side before, They just don't really, maybe they only recently started paying attention to current events and foreign policy and these kinds of things. Who is Julian Assange, Andrew? Why should anybody care? Well, first of all, Julian Assange is one of the most important journalists, purveyors of truth we've had in decades in the world. certainly, you know, in this country, because he released, he was able to obtain and released

crucial information about the way our national security state operates, and particularly how they were fighting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the information they were of concealing about the war crimes they were committing, mowing down civilians in the streets of Baghdad and journalists in the streets of Baghdad. And for that, he's been relentlessly pursued by the national security state in this country. I mean, I believe they've been they've been trying to frame him, trying to get him since, you know, for the last 13 years. And, you know, they concocted a a fake rape accusation charge in Sweden, so as to, with the hopes of hauling him back to Sweden, and then they could send him on here to be tried. He was able to hold that up. And that

was being done with the acquiescence of the British, British state. Julian sort of frustrated that for some years by at the cost of holding himself up in the Ecuador and embassy in London, eventually having suborn the Ecuadoran state, the British police came in and hauled them out, threw him in at horrible prison called Belmarsh in London, which is called rightly the British Guantanamo. And they've left him there while they pursue the legal process to extradite him back to this country. But I think really in the hopes he'll die in prison. health is terrible. So, well, it's a, and one of the many disgusting and shocking aspects of the whole case is

the silence of the media here. I mean, here's a guy who produced a lot of material for them that they use, the New York Times, particularly. But once he, you know, was shown how, you know, that he was, you know, once they'd used that, they abandoned him and left him to his fate. There's been no, you know, concerted campaign and the main three media here to at this outrage that a journalist has been persecuted in this way and it's kind of blind on their part because what makes them think

with the shredding of the First Amendment this represents that they're not going to be next but no they just want to stay in you know good odor with the with the people they really represent so it's it's it's an everyone I'm you know any young person who hasn't heard about it before has to understand this is a crucially important case and people should, you know, call their congressman or do whatever to try and protest this and bring some pressure against this persecution. You know, I just finished talking with Michael Tracy about the new bill to ban TikTok and the danger to free speech that that represents.

And now here just breaking in the Washington Times, Supreme Court worries about limiting fed's interactions with social media companies. And this is, you know, from the Twitter files cases, going to the Supreme Court. And Justice Ketaji, Katanji Brown says, your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods. I'm really worried about that. And these people are traitors to America. Yeah. You just feel like giving up or throwing up. It's like when, you know, Matt Taibi was in front of the House hearing and all the Democrats yelled at him for, it was the liberal Democrats on the panel. Like, you know, Congressman Allred is now running for the Senate in Texas, you know, shouting at him saying, you're not a journalist, so-called journalist. it's just

I'm sort of I guess I shouldn't be shocked in my old age that the liberal Democrats are like so so keen to shred the First Amendment like this but they clearly are and I mean here

they quote some of the conservative justices Thomas Alito and Kavanaugh expressed some skepticism but these are the people who by default are much more inclined to side with the state than the liberals on First Amendment issues.

But I guess it's just partisanship, Uber Alice here, or hopefully, right? Because without that, then they'll just join with the liberals to destroy the First Amendment once and for all. Yeah. I mean, essentially, this is a, you really have to realign your sort of political classifications. like at the State of the Union, Congressman Massey, Thomas Massey, he had Julian Assange's brother, Gabriel Shepton, sitting beside him, you know, as an honored guest. I didn't see much coverage of that given in the reports on the speech, but they, you know, as a noble effort. Actually, there is a little sort of congressional movement. I don't even call it a caucus, you know, protesting at the treatment of Assange. which is bipartisan, you know, you have, like Massey, who's considered normally, you know, or is a

conservative Republican, you know, Ray McGovern, who's a liberal Democrat. So there are a few honorable figures who, you know, see this what it is, but, you know, they're very much in the minority. Yeah, I mean, it's really too bad. And, you know, because of partisanship, it's so hard to build the real consensus of, you know, of the American people that we just absolutely won't tolerate this. Maybe we will, you know, I don't know. Yeah, well, it's, you know, it's being shredded. I mean, the control, obviously, you know, what happened, there's been a concerted effort. The Internet sort of got out of control for a while, and there were all sorts of things,

you know, information freely available to people, which caused people. to, you know, go in directions that the establishment didn't care for. And there's, you know, there's been this concerted effort to bring the social media, the, by the, which is what the, where they're worried about with the internet, bring social media under control. And the whole, you know, that's what the Twitter files revealed. I mean, thank goodness, Mr. Musk for a brief moment at least, was prepared. had to, for whatever reason, to let that happen, to release what Twitter had been doing in

terms of cooperating with the government, with the FBI, to suppress free speech. But I, you know, I have the worst forebodings, especially this horrifying statement by the, you know, beloved liberal justice, Katanji Brown saying, you know, the government being hamstrung by the First Amendment. Isn't that, I mean, that whirring sound must be Thomas Jefferson or James Madison wearing in their graves, but that's where we are. Yeah, that's just amazing that she could even utter something like that out of her own mouth and not think, oh, what the hell am I saying? What the First Amendment? How about, am I allowed to choose my church? Are you going to figure that out for me, too, lady, huh? Oh, yeah, that, yeah, right, right, exactly. If the First Amendment doesn't

mean what it says, and I guess they can just outlaw, I don't know, Presbyterians. I hear they're pretty soft on supporting Israel. Oh, yeah, they better watch out. They'll be in the line up. Yeah, there's even a few Baptists around the world, around the place who maybe might be considered undependable. Yeah. Can't have that. Yeah, really feel like, you know, we're being boiled like frogs, you know. And that's the thing about the Supreme Court is like, like, if they want, they can stand up against the Congress and the President and strike their unconstitutional laws down. But if they wish to uphold them, that's it. We're screwed. Yep, that's it. It's all over.

They got the monopoly on deciding. So the Constitution either says what it says or it don't. And probably more than half the time, it don't. Grim thought, indeed. All right. Well, listen, I am so happy to do. have you back on the show and go over these great articles with you, Andrew. I hope everyone will run out and get the book, Spoils of War. And that's also the substack. Spoilsofwar.com for our real national security budget. And then also check out harpers.org for the latest here,

the Pentagon's Silicon Valley Problem, how big tech is losing the wars of the future. Thanks so much for your time, man. Thank you. Take care. the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk ninety point seven fm in l a psradyo dot com antiwar dot com scot horton dot org and libertarian institute dot org