Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/19/22 Roger Waters on Palestine, Assange and Ukraine

Episode Date: September 22, 2022

Scott interviews Roger Waters, co-founder of the band Pink Floyd. They begin with a look back at how Waters first woke up to the plight of the Palestinians. That leads to a discussion about the persecution of Julian Assange, which Waters has been actively speaking out against. Next they look to the war in Ukraine and discuss Waters’ public back and forth with the first lady of Ukraine Olena Zelenska. Lastly, Scott brings Waters up to speed on the effort to end the war in Yemen.  Discussed on the show: The Heart of Jenin Documentary The Trial of Julian Assange by Nils Melzer  Roger Waters’ Open Letter to Olena Zelenska “Kiev Must Lead the Charge for Peace” (Antiwar.com) 1833stopwar.com Roger Waters co-founded the band Pink Floyd. Waters initially served as the bassist, but following the departure of singer-songwriter Syd Barrett in 1968, he also became their lyricist, co-lead vocalist and conceptual leader until his departure in 1983. Waters has been very active in antiwar and other activism for many years. He has been outspoken against Western involvement in the war in Ukraine, a defender of Palestinian rights, and one of the leading advocates of freedom for Julian Assange. Last month, he conducted a live webinar that was co-sponsored by Antiwar.com. It is archived here. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. 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 dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys introducing roger waters former lead singer of pink floyd of course and with his own solo career he's on tour right now this is not a drill is the name of the

tour and of course he's an activist on a lot of important political topics important to us welcome the show roger how are you sir i'm good thank you i really appreciate you joining us today um and look i got to say before we really start here that i've been listening to pink floyd my whole life and you know your music and and your post pink floyd music too uh but it's always been a big part of my life and that goes for a lot of people listen to and so really appreciate you it's great stuff okay now business I'm very curious

how you got started on sticking up for the Palestinians was there a particular event that kind of opened your eyes to this situation going on there yeah there is in 2006 in the middle of a European tour I accepted an invitation

to perform in Hyken Stadium in Tel Aviv and that was the start of it all from there obviously I started getting some responses initially from North African email addresses. And then very, very quickly, I met the main man, who is Omar Bogutti, because that was just about six months or a year after BDS had been started by Palestinian civil society. So I engaged in a lengthy

email correspondence with Omar. And eventually, well, not eventually, almost immediately, I cancelled the gig, which I believe was sold out in, I never know how you pronounce it, Hyacorn Park, I think it is, in Tel Aviv. And as a sort of act of compromise,

I moved it to somewhere else in Israel. I probably shouldn't have done, but I did at the time. I moved it to somewhere called Wahat, which in Hebrew is Nevis Shalom, which is a sort of ecumenical community where they grow chickpeas and it's about halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. And so we did an outdoor gig there to about 60,000 Israelis, which was lovely, of course. They all did all the things that fans of Dark Side of the Moon do all over their

world and stood up and applauded loudly at the end of the show and backstage was very comfortable nice certain shabby chic sofas and lots of very good food and whiter everything went swimmingly until the moment when ignorant me at the end of the show and spoke into the microphone and said now is the time for you young Israelis to start doing the right thing make peace with your neighbors you know established good relations with the Palestinian and blah blah blah and they went from yeah roger pig Floyd whoa you're the greatest thing ever since you know whatever since lord balfire you're the greatest thing and to what the fuck is he talking about we ain't making peace with anybody what is this guy literally it was i'm being slightly dramatic but

only slightly. And I witnessed that again. Another occasion, the other occasion when I witnessed it most obviously was when I was asked a year later I went back and I went all around the occupied territories and saw everything that I could. And I was looked after on that trip by Allegra Pacheo, who was a Jewish lady who was looking after Unra in Jerusalem at the time. Anyway, I went to give a talk to some students at a film school in Jerusalem, Israeli film students. And I went in and there were about 50 or 60 of them and about 10 or 12 lecturers, professors, whatever you want to call them, gathered and they were all smiling.

It was the same thing. There was a sort of adulation, pink-floid adulation going on. And then I said, hey, before we start, let me ask you. you guys a question because I'd just recently been working with somebody who'd made a documentary film called The Heart of Janine, which is about a Palestinian kid who gets killed by the Israeli army, by the IDF, and he's in this sort of vegetative state, and there's a big thing that goes on trying to persuade his relatives and the local imam and in Janine to allow his body parts to be harvested from his dead.

dead body and distributed throughout the territories to people in need. And they agreed to that, to their internal credit. And a documentary film was made of it, and it's a great film. So I said, before we start, how many of you have seen the film Heart of Janine? And there was a silence, which I expected, because I didn't expect it there. And I started explaining to them what it was about and why it was necessary that they were here. And I got exactly the same reaction that I had.

had at Nevis Shalom when I made my speech at the end of the thing. It was, it's, if you've never seen it, you never want to, because it is ugly beyond anything you can imagine, the shutters coming down. You can almost hear the prison doors slamming on any possibility of anything humane happening in this community when you see it and hear it, because you can hear it, the noise is, definite of their resistance to even listening to anything that would make even the slightest dent in their preconception that the Palestinians are animals and dogs and terrorists and they deserve to be wiped out and shut down like mangy dogs in the street and that is

enough I would hope to get any sane person with a heart and a soul to join any movement to try and make that dent in that surface. So that's how it started. And that was in 2006, 16 years ago. Do you find that a big part of that is kind of the difference between the reality and the common narrative of the situation there? In other words, most of the West sort of seeing the Palestinians in the same way that you just described the Israelis see them?

And you're trying to enlighten people that there's more to the situation. I found that people seem to really not know much about it. And when they really learn about who's occupying who, they come to see your point of view pretty quickly. Yeah, but the powers that be pour an enormous amount of energy into nobody seeing any of it. How could this possibly have gone on for the last 70 years? The United Nations has been seeing it for nearly 70 years. There's a new General Assembly resolution coming up, I believe, at the coming 77th United Nations annual meeting.

It's coming up. It will be a new, and it will be the same resolution that always gets vetoed in the Security Council by Israel, the United States of America, the Marshall Islands, possibly Australia, and two or three other kind of bought and paid for non-entities. And so that's like 129 to 4 or 5 or 6, or however many there are on the Israeli United States side of the argument.

And it's been more or less like that for the last 70 years. But unfortunately, the United Nations is a flawed organization, which has a parafeetor with the five permanent. members of the Security Council. And so it has no teeth, really. And so there's precious little it can do except make a noise, but it's a noise that the mainstream media is far more powerful than the United, than the General Assembly of the United Nations.

So the mainstream, in the United States, that is. Maybe it is in Russia, too. I don't know. I know I'm going to be accused of being a Putin, a prologist, saying anything out loud in this atmosphere. but the mainstream media in America is the mouthpiece of the American government and anybody comes to my show they will see that I write it on the screen

over and over and over again but to get people to and I think that people are beginning to see the first glimmers of that light in the United States of America I'm sitting here looking out of the window

Alcatraz as we speak and it's beautiful it's a sunny day rarely for sentences it's the most beautiful day outside but i always think about alcatraz is always a sort of symbol of um the man's reach into all of our lives so it's an interesting place to be seeing right now yeah uh a prison no longer but uh certainly you know with a reputation as being the worst of them uh the israel of the san francisco bay i guess the gaza strip of the San Francisco Bay, maybe.

So now, it does seem like, along with the Palestinian plight, that the Julian Assange case shares something very familiar, not just the oppression going on and all of that, but the vast difference between the common narrative and the reality of the situation, which is why I think it's so valuable the way you stick up for him all the time. A lot of people might be under the impression,

he's a really bad guy and not the kind of guy that a guy like you would want to stick up for and so you really kind of have a burden of explanation on Assange's behalf that you guys are getting him wrong here's what's really going on with Assange I bet you really open a lot of eyes with that right

I've no idea how many eyes I open but it is one of the most desperately despicable things that's going on in the world at the moment is the way the United States America is persecuting Assange, because he published some truths that the United States government and the people who own the United States government did not want published. So they're killing him for it.

They decided to kill him. Also, something that many people don't know is that the CIA made plans to actually assassinate Julian Assange. This is all coming up now in a court case that's just, that has started now in Spain. and we await the outcome of that case with great interest. But the smear campaign that the United States government and the mainstream media that are in that government's pocket produced to smear Julian Assange to take away any public sympathy for him

was monstrous, a pack of lies, and extremely effective. I would recommend anybody who is listening to this to read Neil Smeltz's book, The Trials of Julian Assange. And then there's a new book coming out as well by Stefania Moritzer, an Italian journalist who has done the most extensive research

into the judicial procedures or in judicial procedures in the Julian Assange case. But they should only make this investment. if they court care at all about human rights or the law, because the United States government does not care about human rights or the law at all, because if it did, the Julian Assange test case would show us that it did,

because this is a man who is being murdered by the state, slow, slow murder, who has committed no crime of any kind of any kind of, of any kind under any international law the only crime he's committed and which he admitted to is a minor bail infringement in the united kingdom for which he is banged up in the highest security prison belmarsh prison which is on the thames estuary um yeah in the thames estuary i was just about to liken it to alcatraz but alcatraz isn't actually it's actually an island whereas belmarth on the mainland.

And he's a completely innocent man. So the British government, and it used to be Boris Johnson, it's now this appalling woman, Liz Truss, who is in complete cahoots with and under the thumb of Washington, D.C., is conniving to keep him locked up until he dies and also conniving to extradite him to the United States, where they will definitely kill him by locking him up, which will kill him. It's already killing him. He's essentially been incarcerated for nearly 10 years.

It's the most open and shut case that you could possibly have staring you in the face of the absolute truth that neither the United States government nor the UK government gives a fake for the law or human rights. You know, it's really unfortunate in America, both political sides, the major ones, have real reason to hate Assange. He embarrassed the Bush government and the Republicans when he helped with the, you know, published the Manning leak, which he just published it. He didn't leak it. He just received the leak. But so that was the Iraq and Afghan war logs and the State Department cables, which also, you know, revealed some things about the Obama administration. administration as well. But then you had his supposed connivance with the Russians, but his actual publishing of some of those.

Oh, fuckin, ho. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Yeah, exactly. But he did publish some of those emails that embarrassed the Democrats in the summer of 16. And so the Democrats hold that grudge. I'll shut up. No, I won't shut up because, as anyone with half a brain knows, the DNC emails were released by somebody in the DNC.

They had nothing to do with hacking. They had nothing to do with the Russians. They weren't released. We know because we know the person who took them from the person who brought them on a stick out of the DNC headquarters and gave them to somebody

and that person gave them to WikiLeaks. None of these people at the ends of these stories, of course, are speaking about it publicly because they need to protect the source. And quite rightly, so. But the fact that Julian Assange published something that showed that Hillary Clinton and the DNC were illegally mining Bernie Sanders run to become the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. That should have been public knowledge. And it embarrasses Hillary

Clinton and the DNC because it shows that they're full of shit. Okay. So, but they, they should be embarrassed by what they did, not by what whoever leaked it did and by the publisher who published it. Why would they do such a thing? Because they're scoundrels. That's why. And so they're embarrassed by it. But that is exactly why we need Julian Assange. We need people like that. How come the, I've forgotten their names now, but the Watergate journalists who I've met them both at God. Woodward and Bernstein. Exactly. Woodward and Bernstein. They're lauded all over the world because they uncovered a political and legal disaster in the Nixon administration.

What, has everything changed now that we no longer want to find out when people in high office are breaking the law or people in our armed services are murdering people in the streets of Baghdad? We don't want to know about that. Apparently not. Yeah. Well, we do. I want to know. I am a concerned citizen. It is absolutely fundamental to anywhere that can call itself a democracy,

that the public are informed, and they need to be informed by the fourth estate. The fourth estate is the press. Unfortunately, the press in the United States of America now is owned either by Rupert Murdoch or some other Scheister, and they limit what they will report to what the government wants them to report. So they are under lock and key. Everything you read in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, thank you Jeff Bezos, you prick, and the New York Times, and all the other big papers, is under the control of the ruling class.

That is why Julian Assange was so fundamentally important to we the people And that is why they're killing him. And that is the truth. I can verify one thing there, too, or as far as it goes, that Craig Murray told me on this show that he knows who leaked the DNC emails and that it had nothing to do with the Russians whatsoever. And he knew at first and had met with the guys. Uh-huh.

I did, I'm, Craig Murray is a friend of mine. Oh, of course. I know always. So I'm glad he's. spoke to you, so you and I can, privately on this webinar, go, yeah, go for it. We definitely see eye to eye on that. And, of course, you're right, too, about, you know, when you mentioned Woodward and Bernstein, well, same thing with Daniel Ellsberg.

Now, he wasn't the publisher. He was the leaker, and he very much broke the law in order to liberate those secrets, and he was proud of it, and the American people were proud of him. And he's always, you know, at least when I was a kid, he was always given credit for helping to end the war in Vietnam by telling the truth about it. And he's, you know, one of the great figures of the 20th century. No one says Daniel Ellsberg is the devil for what he did, except for... It would be more Hirsch.

Yeah. Let's not forget. He wrote pieces about Lieutenant Kelly and the Meiline Massacre. And there have been people like that, and there always will be, because there will always be people that you can't buy. And those are two of them. You know, and John Pilger from Australia. is another but close friend of mine.

And there are, and you and me, let's include us all. We are actually a big family, but it's very difficult for people who only have access to network TV or cable TV or newspapers or things to actually arrive at the same conclusions that we may have done and to join the choir and start singing in harmony with all our brothers and sisters who care about the law. and human rights and democracy and liberty, all the things that the United States government pretends it cares about, but it doesn't.

It's only interested in the... It's only interest in feathering the nests of the Jeff Bezos's and Mark Zuckerbergs of this world and doing their bidding because they pay the government to do their bidding. And the people of America should not be fool into thinking that the charade that they pretend is politics here is a two-part it's not it's one party with two different names it's a punch and judy show but punch and judy both work for the same corporate

masters and then the evidence is all there it's plain to read you only have to look at the way the inequality of wealth in the united states what happened in covid oh it was a terrible disaster It really hit everybody hard. We all lost our jobs. Restaurants, everything, business was because it killed every. No, it didn't. The oligarchs, the billionaires, got richer and richer and rich all through COVID. And they will get richer and richer and richer all through the Ukraine war.

And all through all the further wars that come. And they did through Vietnam. You know, I mean, it's just the facts are there for anybody to see, but you have to be prepared to go, this doesn't feel right. This doesn't feel like the truth. That this is a miracle. This is what Ronald Reagan called the American miracle.

You know, it's not a miracle. It's a disaster for almost everyone. It's not a disaster for the top 0.2 of 1%. It's great for that. They can steal from the rest of us. With no problems at all, they can use. tax offshore, offshore havens, they never pay anybody any tax.

And how can these people be worth hundreds of billions of dollars when there are homeless on the street? When you have no education system to speak of, no healthcare, no safety net, no love in this country for your brothers and sisters, or for your brothers and sisters in other countries over the land. So, I don't know. I doubt that I will live to see it all change and that we will find ourselves living in a society

at some point in the future where we do care for our brothers and sisters but I hope we do. I so hope I see the first glimmers of light. The tide is turning. Hey, y'all, Scott here. Let me tell you about Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc. Who knew?

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that we've just published our managing editor Keith Knight's first one, The Voluntarius Handbook, an excellent collection of essays by the world's greatest libertarian thinkers and writers, including me. Check them all out at libertarian institute.org slash books, and for a limited time, signed copies of enough already and hotter than the sun are available at Scott Horton.org slash books. Searchlight Pictures presents The Roses, only in theaters August 29th, from the director of Meet the Parents and the writer of Poor Things. Comes the Roses, starring Academy Award winner Olivia Coleman, Academy Award nominee

Benedict Cumberbatch, Andy Sandberg, Kate McKinnon, and Allison Janney. A hilarious new comedy filled with drama, excitement, and a little bit of hatred, proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. See The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. I'll tell you what, I'm glad you brought it back to Russia because, of course, this is kind of the worst case scenario in terms of the corruption that you're talking about and the violence, but also in, again, that gap between the narrative and the truth and what you're talking about, you know, the difference between people who are just stuck watching MSNBC and CNN and following all the Ukrainian flags on Twitter and that's all they know and an entire

other narrative out there, which brings me to something I think is really important for people to read. It was an open letter that you had posted on Facebook with a line about Digitrade a walk on part in the war for a leading role in a cage, which was an open letter to the leadership of Ukraine about recommending that they seek negotiations. And then the first lady of Ukraine responded to you. And now we've published your response to her at anti-war.com. Kiev must lead the charge for peace. And I just wonder if you could tell us a little bit about A story and a little bit about the case you made in this piece here. Well, it's a big story, but I'll do my best.

You know, you can't turn this into a short story. All you can do is mention the name John Mearsheimer and say, go and read everything that he wrote in the last 20 years. Because U.S. foreign policy has been leading up to a terrible, disgusting, awful war in the Ukraine for the last 20 years. Well, 18 years at least, started in 2004, and it's all about NATO and NATO encroaching on the Russian borders. And people have been warning the State Department of the United States of America for at least 18 years, that they are creating conditions where a war in the Ukraine will become inevitable.

and unstoppable. And obviously a big part of that was not just instigating, but paying for the illegal coup that happened in the Ukraine in 2014. It's even not, we even have tape recordings of Victoria Newland, who was the Assistant Secretary of State at the time,

under the Obama administration, talking to the US ambassador and between them deciding which of their candidates they were going to impose on the people of the Ukraine as the new president once they'd accomplished the Mayden-inspired coup with the help of people like John McCain and other warmongers, American warmongers. So after 2014, obviously the people of Crimea decided, in a referendum, 96% of them, of the people living in the Crimea decided that they were scared stiff of the new, quote,

Nazi administration in Kiev. And they decided that they needed Russian protection. And they are, they pleaded with the Russians to let them join the Russian Federation. So all the bollocks at the beginning of this about Russia annexing the Crimea is just a bold, bare-faced lie. The people, The people who lived in the Crimea, 96% of them asked to be allowed to join the Federation because they were scared they would be murdered by the regime in Kiev, which, as we know, I mean, not with that, not with that, the original president of Ukraine who was called, began with P, forgotten his term. I'm really bad at names, as you will understand.

Poroshenko. But Boroshenko, okay. But then they had a presidential election in 2019, and Zelensky was elected in a landslide as the new president of the Ukraine. And he was elected on this platform. He said, if I'm president, I will adopt, ratify, and maintain the Minsk II agreement,

which we can talk about until the cows come home, if you want. And I will bring peace to the Donbass. I will stop the civil war. and the Donbass. So when Russia invaded on the 24th of February this year, heinous as that act was, and I condemn it, and I believe Putin to be a weird gangster-like figure.

I have no respect for Vladimir Putin at all. I mean, for God's sake, he rides around on a horse stripped to the waist pretending to shoot polar bears and weird shit like that. He said, obviously a bit deranged. I have no time for him at all. I hope the people of Russia get somebody a bit more like Gorbachev, the president that they had when he withdrew the forces of the USSR

from all the Warsaw Pact territories in Perestroika. But he only did that because a promise was made to him by Baker, I think it was at the time. Was it Baker? No, that's Nick. Yeah. Was it? Okay, that the United States and NATO would not advance one inch closer to the Russian borders

than the eastern borders of Germany if Gorbachev agreed to a reunited journey. So Gorbachev, who I've met, by the way, who was a charming, charming man and brilliant as well as it, but agreed. They shook hands and it was done, except it wasn't. because like almost every treaty that the United States of America has ever made with anybody, they reneged on it, changed their minds and thought, yeah, well, I know we agreed to that. We've changed our minds. And I've been, that's why I talk about going back to 2004, that's when it began that they started

incorporating other countries. With their connivance, the other countries, I have to say, into NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty organization, supposedly a defensive bull walk against the USSR. And so it's from that moment on that Russia started to say, whoa, hold on minute. I thought we had an agreement. And the poor old gangster Putin as well had thought he could become part of the Western Gangster Club, because they're all bloody gangsters. They don't care about the people. None of them. I'm sorry, but your government doesn't he? The United States government couldn't give a shit about the working man,

just not interested. They work for the oligarchs. That's who they're for. That's the way the system set up. If it wasn't set up like that, you would never have got Citizens United through the Supreme Court. Citizens United is such a retrograde piece of legislation. It allows a piece of jurisdiction, should I say, is it's from something that laughingly calls it. of court. It allows the wealthy to buy elections. That's what Citizens United is. That's what it's for. And they do. We see it constant. Every single buy election that you get or midterm election that you get. People who have access to money put packs together and do everything that they can to get the candidate that they want elected, elected. Tell me,

I'm lying and you're an idiot. If anybody who's listening to your program or anybody who hears this or reads this, it says Roger Waters doesn't know what he's talking about. The elections are free and pet. No, they're not. They're bought. And they do it by buying TV advertising and subs. And people through no fault of their own, buy it.

They watch the TV and they go, oh, you know, Julian Assort, he raped those women in Sweden. And he smears cats shit over his, you know, over his. his room in the Ecuadorian embassy. He's crazy and he's disgusting and he's a rapist. He's a convicted rapist. He's not thought. It's just they decided

to smear him because they want him dead. Anyway, but yeah, you know, I always come back and I'm glad now that I can come back to saying I stand on a very small platform. It's smaller than this laptop. And what is it?

It's the Declaration of Human, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from Paris in 1948 when the fledgling United Nations put this document together. I believe it's either 29 or 30 articles long. And it's a beautiful, beautiful document. And everything comes back to that document for those of us who have lived since 1948. And we have to at some point in our lives decide whether we believe in it and think that it's a good document and it's one that should be adhered to by all peoples, all countries, all governments, all over the world, under the supervision of the United Nations or not. Obviously, the United States government doesn't believe in it and is completely disinterested here. and is also completely disinterested in the idea of international law,

which is why it's not a signatory to the Statutes of Roe. That's slightly another story. But I do believe in it. I know you believe in it. I know Craig Murray believes in it. I know John Pilcher believes in it, all right? I know Julian Assange believes in it. I know Daniel Ellsberg believes in it.

I know millions of Americans believe in it, but your government doesn't. couldn't care less about human rights, you know, and that is why your country is run like it is. That is why the 13th Amendment of the United States, which was meant to emancipify the slaves, actually had a, I don't know if it was an amendment to it. He said, no man should be kept in slavery or indentured labor, save that he committed crime, which has allowed them to keep going with slavery until the present day. You have a prison population

that is 10 times anywhere else in the world by comparison with the number of people who live there, the population of any country. You incarcerate far more people ahead, if you like, than any other country in the world. Why? Because you make a profit out of it. Oh, look, he's a vagrant, arrested. Oh, look, he's smoking dope, arrested.

Put them in prison. Well, what they're going to do? They're going to work for a dollar an hour. That's what they're going to do for us. There's fortunes in here. It's brilliant. What a great system. Let's do that.

Bloody good idea. No lies. And that's what they've done. And that's what is happening here now. And luckily, there are a few voices being raised against it, you know, a few. But they will get louder because we are, we the people are many. And they, the oligarchs, are very, very few, but they're very powerful because they are very, very rich. All right, before I let you go about the rest of your day, sir, I want to ask you whether you know about the project right now to push the war powers resolutions through Congress to end the war in Yemen.

Are you aware about that? No, I'm not. Tell me about it. Well, so what got me thinking was I've seen a couple of still shots from your concerts recently where there's sort of the big electronic banner that says Free Assange, or it says, remember, Shereen Akla, and this kind of thing. And I was thinking what would go perfect up there would be 833 Stop War and 833 Stopwar.com. And what it is, it's a progressive group called Demand Progressive Group called Demand Progress.

hosts the website, but they're a nonpartisan group. They're not tied to the Democrats, but they're a left group. And it's a very simple website. It has some bullet points about the Yemen War, and it has some talking points of what to tell your Congresspeople, Republican or Democrat, about supporting what are right now active war powers resolutions to end the Yemen War. It's in both houses of Congress right now. Well, what are they, Scott? Tell me what they're. Or if we haven't got time, you've got my email address, just send me the details by it. But I'd love to know here in front of the people, what is it? Well, what it says is it absolutely mandates an end to all American support for the Saudi

and UAE war in Yemen. There's a ceasefire there right now, but this essentially would make it illegal. It would force Biden to call a halt to all maintenance, all support, all resupply of weapons, all logistics and intelligence and support for the Saudi and UAE war. And Biden had promised to end it, but then he didn't. Well, who's the sponsor of this? Well, in the Senate, it's Sanders and Warren and a couple of others. And in the House, it's DeFazio. And I'm sorry, I forget, but there are actually more than 116 co-sponsors in the House right now.

So this thing really does have momentum behind it. There's about 100 left-wing groups. And then we're also working really hard to get all libertarians. and right-leaning groups on board, too. Bring Our Troops Home.U.S. and others like that. So what would they need? Would they need 50% in the House of Representatives? What percentage of the vote do they need to get this into law? Well, they would need 51% in the House,

and I'm not sure if it would be a problem with the filibuster in the Senate if they would need 60 votes or not. But I can tell you this, sir. In 2019, they did pass it with enough public pressure, and unfortunately Donald Trump vetoed it then. but it would be much more difficult for Biden to veto it with a Democratic Congress passing it and when he vowed to end the war in the first place

in a way that Donald Trump never did. So it's true that he could still veto it, but I don't think that he would. And I think there's a very real chance that enough public pressure could force the resolution through and that that resolution could end the war. And I'll tell you your help sure would be invaluable. Tell me this then.

If they did manage to get it through, and I will do everything that I can to help you and to help Bernie and Warren and the people in the House of Representatives. If this does become, how does the United States end the war by stopping selling weapons to them or giving them weapons or by in some way censoring the sovereign kingdom of Saudi Arabia? Yeah, I mean, that probably wouldn't happen. But yes, it would simply be, it would demand an end all-made. But what you have to understand about this war is they came to Obama and asked for a green light in the first place in 2015, and that all through the rest of his administration, all through Trump and through Biden's terms, we've been supporting it the whole time. And without that support, they can't fly their F-15s. They can't drop bombs. They can't run any of the logistics of the intelligence or any of that themselves. It's the USA doing it all for them with the help of the British and the French.

But if Congress demanded that Biden end the war, then presumably that would mean he could bring the British and the French along to and pressure the Saudis that, okay, that's it. Our bluff's been called and we have to stop now. So what you're really doing is trying to bring pressure on the armaments industry. You're trying to bring pressure on Dwight D.Izenhaus friends in the military industrial complex to shut down some of their operations, shut down all the operation that is supplying arms to help the South. is murder people in the end. So here's the thing I think about it is, you know, and I know you've been like this for decades too, but we cover these wars, we complain, we educate people, we do everything we can, but here we literally have active war powers resolutions

in both houses of Congress, which is just world historical, unheard of, potential cudgels for us to use to really force something to happen here. Right. Well, thank you for informing. me on this and I will try and do something about it in my shows. That's great. That is absolutely great. And I'll be happy to send you all the information in the email there. Please do. I will read it all. That's what I do a lot of the waking hours of my days

is I just read and read and read to try and stay up to date on this stuff. So that's good news. One little bit of good news. Thank you. Great. And listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show and everything about your career up to and including this moment, sir. all right scott thanks thank you very much all right cheers bye the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a psradyo dot com antiwar dot com scott horton dot org and libertarian institute dot org