Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/3/23 Jim Bovard on the 1993 WTC Bombing and Global Engagement Center

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

Scott is joined by Jim Bovard to discuss two articles he recently published. The first marked the 30-year anniversary of the World Trade Center bombing of 1993. Scott and Bovard talk about what the FBI knew before the attack. Next they discuss Bovard’s article on the Global Engagement Center, an Obama-era internet censorship mission center operating out of the State Department.  Discussed on the show: “30th Anniversary of the FBI’s Biggest ‘Bomb’” (Libertarian Institute) “Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast” (New York Times) “Why did this cop turn up dead?” (CNN) 1000 Years for Revenge by Peter Lance “How the feds spend $74M a year to try to censor Americans” (New York Post) “Twitter Files: GEC, New Knowledge, and State-Sponsored Blacklists” (Racket News [formerly TK News]) Jim Bovard is a columnist for USA Today and the author of Public Policy Hooligan: Rollicking and Wrangling from Helltown to Washington. Find all of his books and read his work on his website and follow him on Twitter @JimBovard. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; 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 than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show hey guys on the line i've got junior editor at uh no junior fellow jim bovard uh one of the greatest libertarians ever and the writer of most of the books that have ever been published in

American history, which you can all find under his file at Amazon.com, including lost rights and the Bush betrayal and freedom and chains and attention deficit democracy. Ah, I love that book. And of course, public policy hooligan, that's a book he wrote about himself. It's really good. And, man, you guys are going to love this article that he's got at the Libertarian Institute, 30th anniversary of the FBI's biggest bomb. And I know you guys are saying, no,

because the FBI didn't bomb the Branch Davidians until April the 19th. So no, no, no, it's not about that. It's about the World Trade Center bombing of 1993. Welcome back to the show. Jim, how are you doing? Hey, Scott, thanks for your kind words. It's always happy to show up as a junior fellow.

Hell yeah. Well, I'm so happy to have it. I'm waiting to get a special T-shirt. shirt for that but you know um we should do that hope lives eternal no i'm i'm joking i don't need a t-shirt i've got too many t-shirts from bluegrass concerts that's funny you know what i'm taking a note right now we're going to get it done ha ha ha i'm going to get top lobster to do it so it's going to be really dope we'll make sure you have your choo-choo train hat uh hey scott first you've got to finish your book first you got to finish the book that's going to be a little while

I outsource the art, man Listen, this article is so good and important And I already know everything about this But I learned all kinds of things about it from you In this piece And it's such an important story

And it's one of the things that made me such a political radical At the time, in fact, I'll tell you a story I just thought of it Here I am Driving to junior college one day I'm going to say it was 1997 And I'm on I 35 listening to Rush Limbaugh, and the caller says,

Hey, Rush, you know, you got to read the New York Times from October 28, 1993. Because in there, it's all about how the FBI could have stopped the World Trade Center bombing, but they didn't. And then he's gone, and Rush starts talking about football or some other thing, gone. You know, like, but Snurdley didn't get on the button in time to save us from the entire thing. but I'm good at names and dates and stuff and I was actually on my way to a place with a gigantic library

with the New York Times on microfiche like at the time I was on my way there so that's what I did I went straight to the library and I looked up October 28th, 1993, New York Times and there's all kinds of stuff in there there's an obituary for Gottlieb, the M.K. Ultra Scientist

and what was the other thing I can't remember but what there is is there's Ralph Blumenthal and Ralph Blumenthal is explaining how there's tapes of an FBI informant in conversation with his FBI handlers and them admitting to him that, yeah, we could have stopped

the first World Trade Center bombing. Now, I have another story as long as I'm wasting time talking stories. One time I had a guy in my cab, and I was saying, come on, the FBI, they'd never stop a terrorist attack. They like terrorist attacks. That's their job, man, you know, making money

and getting promotions and having problems, and whatever I was telling him. And he was saying, you're crazy kid, you don't know what you're talking about. And I said, well, really? It's the October 28th, 1993, New York Times. You can look it up. It's by Ralph Blumenthal.

And he goes, Ralph Blumenthal, well, I know Ralph Blumenthal. He's a friend of mine. You're telling me he wrote that? And I said, that's right, buddy, read it and weep, pal. And he said, all right, well, I'll look into it. So, anyway, those are my stories that I happen to remember and feel like saying to you right now. But this is, you know, a big part of what made me such a political radical in the 1990s was, How can they get away with this stuff?

They get away with covering up a bombing that could have toppled one tower or any of the other. They get away with murder and all those branched of idiots. They get away with, did you see the groundbreaking story today in CNN, Jim, about Terry Yakey, the Oklahoma City police officer, hero from the scene of the bombing, who was clearly murdered probably by the FBI because he was on to what they had done there. and CNN had that CNN has that today man you got to read it I am shocked yeah so listen this is what made me who I am is this stuff before the terror wars even broke out was you know along with you know covering up the Gulf War illness and some other things but but World Trade Center Waco and Oklahoma bombing and I know that Oklahoma is supposed to sound like more conspiracy cooties isish or something but that's just not true like we We know what happened there. And anyway, it's a different story than we're going to talk about today.

But this is huge. And yeah, it's 30 years ago, but that's just a blink of an eye to a lot of us anyway. 1993. It was a good year for me. So please take us through every bit of this. I did talk for the first 10 minutes of this interview, but you're going to talk for the rest of it. I want to know all of what you talk about here, because this is just incredible your research and the way you put it together and the way you developed the story beyond what I ever understood about it. Well, it's a fascinating story to me, something that I came across, it had not showed up my radar in 93 because I was basically, you know, chasing rabbits to finish up lost rights at that point.

But when I was writing terrorism and tyranny in 2002 and 2003, I came across this and it was a, you know, a shining example of how the feds had just completely failed to have any kind of competent anti-terrorism efforts. So this is a case that started in November 1990. Rabbi Meyer Kahane was assassinated in New York, at a New York hotel. He started their Jewish Defense League, and he was advocating banishing all Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories. His political party was banned from the Israeli parliament for inciting racism and endangering the peace. But he had a lot of supporters here in the U.S., New York, perhaps especially. So he was shot by a 36-year-old Egyptian immigrant who was part of an anti-Israel group there in the New York area. The police searched the shooter's residence. They carried off 47 boxes of documents, maps, diagrams, stuff like that, including the World Trade Center.

Well, it turned out that no one in the New York FBI office could read Arabic. So those documents are roadmap to the 1993 bombing the World Trade Center, were left. in storage for a couple years. And it turned out that the New York police did not want to delve deeper in this. They want a nice simple case. Okay, slam dunk, all so on and so forth. So the trial for this guy, the guy that killed Kahani, was marked by rioting outside. There was a clashes between his supporters, the Muslim supporters, nasty business.

And what the FBI did was placed in an informant, Emed Salam. a former Egyptian military officer in the midst of the Muslim protesters. And he was able to wheedle his way in close to the blind Sheikh, Sheikh Abdul-Raman, who was a leader as far as the resistance in that area. And flash forward in mid-1992, the FBI informant warns them that the Muslims were planned to carry off a catastrophic bombing in the New York area. His supervisors thought he was lying and canceled his $500 a week in foreman pay. You know, six, eight months later, the massive bomb explodes underneath the World Trade Center,

killed six people, injured 1,000, half a billion dollars in damage. If that van had been parked a few feet further or closer to a pillar, the entire tower might have collapsed at the World Trade Center, killing thousands of people. Now, it's funny how the news coverage, this once it happened. The FBI got lots of praise because they're able to break the case because one of the plotters went to the rider rental truck place where he'd run the van and demanded a $400 refund on his deposit. You know, this is a really bad move if you're a terrorist plotter.

You know, you'd never go back and ask for your refund or your deposit. But he did, and the Time magazine said the FBI looked supremely capable and speedily rounding up the suspects, from the bombing. What they didn't tell us until it didn't come out until later in 1993 was that this guy, Salem, had been inside. He had warned the FBI as the Muslim group was planning to do a bombing. And Salem and his taped phone calls to the FBI because he didn't trust him. I mean, a lot of people have that trouble. But he was saying that the FBI had supervised the building of the bomb. It was supervised by your confidential informant.

What a wonderful, great case it would be. So, and he was, you know, in the phone calls, he was anguishing. He said, everything was all set up. And Salem, this guy offered to substitute a fake powder for the bomb explosive such that no one would get hurt. FBI said no. So thanks to that, the, you know, the bomb went off. And that headline, that New York Times piece, which you mentioned, it was a headline that stuck in my head. Tapes depict proposal to thwart, bomb, use, and trade center blast.

Yep, that's it. And it's like, so how did this vanish in the memory hole? How did the FBI ever get its reputation back? And it's even worse than that because Newsday, the following day, had a story about there was a second FBI informant in the same group, and he had, he was, he had, he had infiltrated the Jersey City mosque, and, I didn't know that. If I had ever known that, I had forgotten that, but I don't think I ever knew that. Yeah, that was something which I had forgotten until I was going back over my notes from terrorism and tyranny in 2002. The, so the, so the, so the informant,

that informant, uh, had met with FBI officials for an entire, entire day and to talk about providing the suspects with a counterfeit dynamite. But the FBI was worried about an entrapment charge, so they pulled the informant off the assignment the next day. According to Newsday, I would guess there was a hell of a lot more to that specific, but, you know, it's here again, it's just amazing how much of this vanished into the memory hole. Now, some folks say, well, this, you know, the informants weren't trustworthy. Well, the FBI Justice Department paid Imelam a million dollars for his testimony in 1995

to convict the other Muslim plotters. So, but it's just, it's fascinating to me to see how the, this is something which completely foreshadowed the FBI failures on the 9-11 attacks because there was a line that Lewis Free, FBI director said in 1997, he was, you know, pushing Congress for a bigger budget. that he promised he would double the shoe leather for counterterrorism. You know, but walking is no substitute for thinking. And these FBI agents didn't know how to use computers or had old computers that could not be used for email or searching the web.

There was an ethos that real men don't type. And so that's part of the news. Yeah, and they don't go down to the local college and ask somebody to help them with some Arabic translations either. Yes. That's like women's work or something. Is that it? I don't know, but there was a macho element to some of the FBI agents that has not been helpful to their understanding what they're investigating. But you had the same thing after the 9-11 attacks.

You had the Bush administration working to sweep a lot of the FBI failures under the rug. But, you know, this is an agency that did not learn from the first World Trade Center bombing. And it seemed like what it learned from 9-11 was it had to launch all these entrapment schemes all over the place. At the same time that they've rounded up lots of, you know, hapless nitwits, mostly. They've also failed to stop a number of other violent terrorist attacks. So folks wonder why I'm cynical. Yeah, seriously. Well, you know, I really don't like Peter Lance and I can't bring him up without mentioning that.

But his book is really good, A Thousand Years for Revenge. And he basically tells the story. you were saying there that they didn't do a thorough job investigating the murder of this crazy right-wing rabbi and therefore they didn't really have you know they didn't do as good of a job as they could have in infiltrating this ring but even then the degree to which they had infiltrated it they well i know this story i think this is a bit of this is in the times piece too is that the way they portrayed anyway was that these street level agents, Nancy Floyd and John Antisev, that they essentially were trying to work with this informant. And at least the way

they, in their scenario here, it was their supervisor, Carson Dunbar, who essentially just had no interest in this. He was too busy, you know, prosecuting John Gotti or some other thing and just didn't care and wasn't interested and i think besides taking the five hundred dollars or refusing to pay him the six that he was asking for whatever it was try to insist that salam wear a wire while he sleeps on the floor of the mosque with these other guys and he's like well come on man i'm not wearing a wire you know and then anyway they just didn't want to hear it but you know it occurred to me while you're talking there that i have some of this audio it's just uh about 50 seconds worth if you want to listen to it, Jim.

Let's see what it is. Everything was submitted with a receipt. Yeah. And now it's questionable. It's not questionable. It's like a little out of ordinary. Okay. All right.

I don't think it was, if that's what you think that is fine. But I don't think that because we would start already building the bomb, which is went off in the World Trade Center. It was built by supervision from the Bureau and the DA. And we was all informed about it, and we know that the bomb started to be built. By who? By your confidential informant? What a wonderful great case.

And then he put his head in the sand. I said, oh, no, no, no, that's not true. He is son of a bitch. Okay. It's built with a different way in another place, and that's it. So there you go. So he's the informant. That is him.

Yeah, so he's the informant he's talking about. And he says, up, but then you pulled me off, and it was built. somewhere else by someone else. And there he's talking about Ramsey Yusuf and who built a real bomb and killed six people. And as you say in the book, and this has been, you know, engineers talked about this. People can find this easily

where it's just widely understood that if they had just parked the truck over there instead of over here, taking out the retaining wall instead of the pillar that they chose to take out or even just a different pillar, whatever it was, that that could have tipped one tower over into the other, broken from the bottom, and tipped them over. And at, what was it, 4 o'clock in the afternoon or something? I think it was earlier, but I'm not sure.

Okay. Yeah, you may be right. You may be right. I'm not married to the time there. Sorry, but it was not like first thing in the morning before anybody got there, and it was not after hours when most people had gone home. It was like during the workday, for sure. And so here, Bill Clinton's the present.

He's been present for a month and a week, right? He's brand new. And then two days later, the ATF raids the Branch Divideans, and the FBI takes over all that. So now, on one hand, we got mullet-headed dudes with transams in Texas, and on the other hand, we have all these weird Muslim guys from overseas with weird names and a weird language that we don't understand. and you could just see how the interest was so divided away from this story, which could have, should have been the biggest story in the whole world. Because, I mean, just think of it, like if you hadn't had the Davidian thing happen at all, and people had had a minute to say, well, wait a minute,

they really could have knocked one tower over and in the other. Let's just use our imagination and think how bad this could have been and what's really going on here. And why do we have Egyptian Islamic jihad living in Brooklyn, blowing up our skyscrapers and why did these guys used to work for the CIA in Afghanistan and what is the damn deal and how do they get into the country and we know that too that the CIA intervened with the State Department to let them in and with the INS to let them in yeah well it's just one damn mystery after another I'll tell you man it's um yeah there's an alternative history

of the 90s there without Waco where things are different you know and it may be much worse. I don't know. Or maybe people would have got it through their head right then that like, man, we really should stop bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi, which is what Ramsey Youssef said was part of his motive. That in Palestine. That's what Al-Qaeda said, you know, all decade long. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, this World Trade Center in Waco were 93, lost rights. My book came out in 94. And so many people said, yeah, you know, you're just a damn cynical. You know, it's got some good stuff. is too cynical, so I'm thinking, like, yeah, yeah, well, you know, how's your faith in government work out? I know, it's crazy. I mean, I was joking on Twitter the other day about, I don't know

why I'm going to quote myself, I'll just tell the joke to you now. But how could the FBI have done any of this other stuff when we all know that they were abolished back after Waco? Because that's how it works in America, right? And kill all these people. 25 kids? I thought it was 17. It was 25 kids and two pregnant women. This mask of the biggest thing since the first wounded knee? Well, it was the, you know, it's not easy to prevent child abuse. Yeah, no, you got to go the hard way, apparently, according to the federal police, Jim. So anyway, but, yeah.

Now, hang on, because there was more in here that I learned that I wanted to dig into with you here. Louis Free. Yeah, I don't like him. well i guess you know part of the story was how the kind of same group of people just continued to do the same thing and the fbi instead of ever rounding them up or working with the CIA to round these guys up or certainly cease their occupation of saudi arabia and motivating their attacks against us in the first place or anything like that um they just kind of i mean in fact as i'm documenting in my new book

Bill Clinton backed the jihadis in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya. And so this whole time, like, they're looking at these guys like, eh, they're kind of dangerous. I mean, they did almost topple one tower and the other that one time. But on the other hand, we can use them to kill Serbs. And did you know, Jim? I didn't know this. I knew that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Ramsey Youssef's uncle had fought in Bosnia on Bill Clinton's side. And that that was where he earned his stripes.

That's in Fools Aaron. but I see I never read the 9-11 commission report because as Ron Paul would have said I don't want to be confused by their propaganda you know I just read private sector journalists but I didn't realize that it was in there somebody I finally saw footnote somewhere that two of the hijackers the the San Diego cell that famous were in the country for a year and a half that the CIA followed to LAX and and for whatever reason the FBI never rolled up that whole time or yeah anyway that whole thing those two guys um I was saying their name's wrong. Hasmi and Midhar.

Or, is it Hasmi? Hamzzi? Hosmi. They fought in Bosnia, too. That was how they earned their stripes as legit al-Qaeda terrorists to join the crew to hit the Pentagon. Wow. I didn't know that. Give me just a minute here.

At the Libertarian Institute, we published books. Real good ones. So far, we've got Will Griggs-Snow quarter. Sheldon Richmond's coming to Palestine and what social animals owe to each other. and four of mine, fools Aaron, enough already, the great Ron Paul, and my brand new one, hotter than the sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons. And I'm happy to announce that we've just published our managing editor Keith Knight's first one, the Voluntarius Handbook, an excellent

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Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. So, you can see why there's all these... And, you know, Colleen Rowley, Jim, who famously, she was the lawyer for the FBI office in Minneapolis, and it's not exactly right, I say her team, but the team she was on, what they were doing was they had busted this guy, Musawi, who wanted to learn how to fly a jumbo jet, but not how to take off or land it. and they were totally as you know i think one of the employees from the place um had mentioned this

and then they had mentioned this in their cables to headquarters that we think this guy might want to try to crash into the world trade center something like that that was their speculation and um she believes and there's the article that she wrote for consortium news about this and i try to flesh this out as good as i can in the new book too that part of the reason that the FBI supervisors would not let Minneapolis go to the FISA court to get a FISA warrant, as you know,

on a much lower threshold than probable cause, just a reasonable belief that this guy is an agent of a foreign power or a foreign terrorist group, right? The only reason that they had on that was that French intelligence confirmed that he and his brother were recruiters for the jihad in Chechnya, for Al-Qa-Tab.

But we like Al-Qaeda. And we like what those guys are doing in Chechnya. And so that doesn't count, even though this guy, Qatab, is, you know, bin Laden's twin brother, in essence, right? And direct associate of bin Laden's. And so they said essentially this guy, yeah, he might be a bin Ladenite terrorist, but to us he's a moderate rebel because of he's fighting against the Russians and we hate them more, right? just like we hate the Alawites more in Syria, or we hate the Houthis more in Yemen, this kind of thinking.

And so that was why Minneapolis couldn't get their warrant for Musawi's computer, which, as is proven documented, if they'd open his computer, as they eventually did on September 11th after it was too late, they could have traced this guy directly to the main cell in Hollywood, Florida,

with Muhammad Atta and his buddies. And they could have stopped September 11th right there. Then it was covering for the jihad and Cheshire. I'm just ranting all over your interview. But isn't that great story, man? You know, the shit they get away with. It's just, it is mind-blowing. I understand it sounds like crazy stuff,

but it's just how crazy the world is. That's all. Yeah, there's some great stuff calling Raleigh's done, and I certainly appreciate her candor and her courage, talking an inside view from the FBI. And, you know, I think I interviewed her about that subject. I bet that's in those notes. I know I wrote about this in the book,

but now I'm thinking I've got to follow that up. I bid off way too much more than I can chew with this book, Jim. It was supposed to be how America started the war in Ukraine, but now it's really everything America did unfairly, basically, kicking the Russians while they're down over the last 30 years and how it led to this. And so it's long. So it does have sections on Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya and Kyrgyzstan and every damn thing.

So I guess we'll see if people want to bite off the whole thing and chew it with me by the time I'm done. well it's not like it's going to be a great book and i just hope you don't run out of dr pepper yeah well no they're still cranking that stuff out around here for the money you know yeah i was i was flying i was flying to dallas once about a decade ago and there were these two middle age women and you know they you know they you know they were just chatting pretty loud and you know there was and there's there was one that turns the other one says i can't wait to get to Dallas to have a D.P. And I was thinking, wow, well, she, you know, I didn't think she was out

wild, but, oh, Jim. Oh, that's bad. You're a terrible man. Hey, I didn't know D.P. was an abbreviation for Dr. Pepper. I just figured, you know, hell, let's see, you know. That's because you're from one of them northeastern New England Yankee states up there. Hey, hey, hey, hey, I was born in Iowa, a Midwestern. It's a flag of convenience. All right. Yeah, well, that might as well be New England to me, man. Oh, listen to this shit. Listen to this shit. Okay. You're the, no, I can't say that on the interview. So I'll shut up. Hey, I'm a Texan. It's the end of that sentence. Well, yes, indeed. All right, shut up. I'm going to interview you about your other article now.

This is really good stuff, too. How the Fed spends $74 million a year to try to censor Americans. How do they do that, Jim? The state, well, there's a lot of different programs they use to censor, a lot of different grantees, but this is the State Department branch that has gotten revved up here in the last few years and is now, you know, shoveling out money to a bunch of secret private contractors who are going around trying to throttle people on Twitter and elsewhere. So it's a, it's an unsavory business. This is part of the global engagement. center of the State Department, created by Obama in 2016.

And it's basically gone wild in recent years, doing a lot of, you know, with these long, sending Twitter, for instance, a list of a quarter million Twitter users, Twitter million accounts, which the State Department wanted to see canceled. And the reason was that these were people, someone that were talking about how the COVID pandemic was actually a lab leak and not something that came from some way. market in China. So, I mean, it was obviously necessary to shut them down. Yeah.

It's just amazing that. You know, just like with any of these things, you know, Taibi had that piece yesterday. I mean, it's a great Twitter thread. I don't know if he gets into it too much in the Twitter thread, but in his article on Substack, he talks about how this really all started as sort of a panic of counter recruitment against ISIS,

which, of course, didn't work. at all because people were joining ISIS for reasons that didn't include misinformation had fooled them. You know, all that was stupid. But then of course, ISIS was just you know, al-Qaeda in Iraq was

dead until Obama and America's allies backed the al-Qaeda forces in Syria for three and a half years until it blew up into, you know, ISIS broke off from al-Qaeda and created their Islamic State in Syria and then a year later in Iraq and all. And then all that was

trying to make up for Rock War II, you know, and all this is just consequences that we got to live with. You are a Russian bot, Jim, and we're going to throttle your presence down because you retweeted a thing based on authority granted to try to prevent a terrorist in Iraq from recruiting a young kid in the suburbs of, you know, somewhere in Iowa 10 years ago. well yeah i mean the the the standards this is a government agency whose motto is close enough for government work and so it just has these massive lists thousands of thousands of people including many americans who who they want to silence but they've got no reason for it for instance the according to the uh this state department branch uh if someone supports the french yellow vest

protests that were anti-lockdown, then you're Russian-aligned. And it's like, I supported that protest. It's about the best thing the French have done since the battle of Waterloo. So, but that would make me rush and aligned. But there's a lot of other stuff I've written that would probably get me qualified for that already. Yeah, seriously. Well, I know, and it's something worth bragging about, as you do in your books, you've been condemned by all these government agencies for all of your great work.

against them that actually hit the mark when you published it, too. Not just as good stuff, but it's stuff that they had to respond to by ruthlessly denouncing you and your lies. So that is definitely something to be proud of. And I would not doubt whatsoever if they had like preemptively put you on the Russian list or whatever it is. This guy, Bovar, don't let him get retweeted. No, I don't know. I retweet you, but. Well, thanks very much. I appreciate that. Yeah, the Washington Times did a story last summer about how the Justice Department had pressured USA Today to stop publishing me. So, you know, I'm sure there's been a lot of other stuff that happened behind those doors. You know, I forgot about that because all the holes in my head.

Tell that story again. Yeah, so I was writing, you know, I've been writing for USA Today for decades, actually, but I started doing a lot more for them around 2014, 2015. I was having fun smacking around Eric Holder, the Attorney General, at that point. And so his press chief sends these emails to my editors at USA Today, basically pressuring them to stop publishing me, which they did not do at that time, which was good. But it was interesting. It took me, it was difficult to get copies of these emails. Let's just put like that. Were you working for Indian intelligence at the time?

that's what's this here? Indian intelligence. No, I was just throwing rocks at the government. It's cheaper than therapy. All right, man. Well, you know, I wonder whether all this stuff that's been revealed by Matt Taibi about all the influence on Twitter. And, of course, you know, we can only imagine,

but we must be right that they're doing the exact same thing at all these other major. you know Silicon Valley institutions and all that but this I think Facebook is worse but yeah go ahead I mean yeah it must be but Google too I mean Google's yeah Google doesn't even work anymore you know it's so and and it must be the politics of it that does it but I you know I just do nothing but research things all damn day and I'm telling you the thing used to be great in terms to finding what it is that you're looking for and it's just and and it's clear that the algorithm has been shifted and I blame the FBI but all this is unconstitutional right this is

just blatant like if it ever came to somebody has the right standing to sue them all and some kind of a thing and back against all the Supreme Court if they're going to live up to their oath at all they would have to say that the First Amendment forbids all of this you can't do this government right well it's it's interesting you had the FBI you had Christopher FBI chief saying and tell him that was it Brett Baer a few nights ago, he said, well, we don't, we don't do sensory. We're, you know, we aren't truth police. We're in a ministry of truth.

But if you look at the time sequence, you had President Biden in July 2021, came out and accused Facebook and other social media companies are murdering people by, by letting stuff go on there that was critical. the COVID vaccines. The president came out, said Facebook and others are killing people. So you've got a presidential accusation of murder that's followed up by hints by top officials. Well, we could do some regulatory action here, maybe some antitrust action. And then the FBI shows up and says, hey, we'd like you to cancel these accounts.

Yeah, you know, this is about as voluntarily, a voluntary is a person paying a shakedown person from the mob after they watch this store next door get fire bombed yeah seriously and you know greenwald and others have written about this where it's when i think taibi has covered this too that it's when the congress came to silicon valley and read these guys the riot act and said look fall in line or we're going to make you and you know it could be worse so just do what we want and then that was it they started finding people guilty of being russian bots or whatever was the order of the day but I think the point being that they didn't want to get into this, right? Facebook and Twitter and whoever, they want to let people say whatever they want, you know,

up to obviously the limit of threats and this and that. But in terms of different... I don't know. I would... I think that may have been fairly true of Twitter up to some point, maybe 2015, 2015, 2016. I guess the idea was just to protect themselves, right? They didn't want to have to be required to put their thumb on the scale. They didn't want to set the precedent that they're...

here to put their thumb on the scale. I'm sure there must have been some of that. I don't mean to like apologize for them. But it's different. It's a whole new era when the government came and said, listen, everybody's a Russian. Everybody's trying to spread COVID and kill everybody. Yes, you're just saying their quota, kill grandma. And then turn everything into the emergency. And you know, Caitlin Johnstone wrote about how, well, look, and then all of a sudden they just switch all the censorship to Ukraine. Now you're not allowed to be bad on Ukraine or there's sense of you for that. But what's the COVID emergency to life there? you know like that's now we're just straight talking about we don't like your opinions and you're

gone they just the slippery slope straight to the bottom immediately censoring anti-war opinions you know well it's the government's been doing that for a damn long time so not overtly mostly but i mean there's a lot of elbows and winks and nods and you meet you see some of the people in washington well no i'll just i'll stop and be polite well i'll say i mean it used to be that you googled things and anti-war.com came up because we got 100 million pages of really great journalism and writing and opinion pieces on all these things

going back for 25 years. And so our, you know, in the natural order of things, our SEO scores, our killer. But they just downrank all this. You never just come across anti-war.com on the front page of Google results. Looking for this or that anymore, I don't think. It's a deliberate choice that they made.

I hate to give credit to them horrible Trotskyites over at the World Socialist website, but I think they did the best journalism on this where they showed all their analytics about how all their referrals from Google just went all the way through the floor. And then they found that it was the same for anti-war.com, but also for

truth out and truth dig and a bunch of other kind of just one click left of the Democrats type sites. Both of those truth thingies there I just mentioned were not like radical, communist, anything. Not that those people should be censored either. But they were

just, you know, good on war. It's all you could say they're guilty of. And then I guess part of the story was they had censored so many right-wingers who were like pro-Trump people that they were trying to prove that they're fair. And so they had to persecute all these leftists too. Now, they don't persecute a bunch of Democrats, right?

They persecute people, you know, to the left of the Democrats. And then anti-war.com got thrown in with that, I think. And which goes to show that they don't know what they're doing. right just right shocking shocking uh and then but there's no remedy for that you know and and you'd have to have julina saunge out of the pen and and with a really really really secure website for somebody to ever prove that that's what happened was the government made them do that but you know taibi is saying it's amazing you read through this and you go well they're not building cases they're not doing criminal work here at all this is just the fbi being hall monitors and trolling on the

web for things they don't like and what the hell is this what does this have to do with their mandate what law or even regulations says that they have the authority to do this at all it's nuts now this thing that you're listening today this GEC thing I guess was created for that purpose but the FBI

itself camped out in San Francisco emailing Twitter who just censor all day there's no law that says they could do that who even made that up this look this is how the the feds operate So, you know, I agree with you.

It shouldn't be that way. But, you know, it's like the gambling at the casino in Casablanca. So it happens. That's true. Well, they're the people who burn the branch of it. Is they do anything after that? Before that or after, obviously. You know, somebody got mad at me one time for not mentioning the move bombing enough.

But I guess that's because Waco mattered so much to me at the time. And I didn't know about the move bombing until later. but that was the Philadelphia cops but with a bomb that they got from the FBI that they dropped on those people so that's you know obviously another huge atrocity most people don't know about but I'll just put move bombing into your Google

images results everybody if they'll show you I mean presumably some search engine with image results will show you what they did to those people there man that's another wakeo and I'm sure there's more coming soon we'll see all right well you got any more articles you wrote lately jim oh i'm on deadline right now so i'm scrambling here to get something done by five oh i see that's all this body language about hurry up horton and let me out of here well that's fair you should go right and and educate them

new yorkers well i do what i can all right well thanks jim appreciate it hey scott thanks so about your Emmy program. Good luck with your book. I'm looking forward to see it. Oh, yeah. Thanks, Jim. All right, you guys. That's Jim Bovart. He's at Jimbovar.com, and he's on Twitter at Jimbovard as well. And his latest book is Public Policy Hooligan. And again, he's our junior fellow, which I don't think means that Lori is older than him. I think it just means that she was a fellow before he was. At the libertarian institute, libertarian institute.org. 30th anniversary of the

FBI's biggest bomb and at the New York Post, this one that I can't find anymore about the First World Trade Center bombing. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.