This is moderate rebels. I'm Ben Norton, joined by my co-host, Max Blumenthal, and we're speaking with

the peace activist David Swanson, the author of many books about war and empire. And one of the things

we're going to talk about today is, of course, war and empire. Like always, we're going to talk

about the Biden administration's foreign policy and the new secretary of state, war and empire. Like always, we're going to talk about the Biden

administration's foreign policy and the new secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, who's

extremely hawkish in the congressional hearings. I mean, he went down the list of wars that

he supported in Libya and elsewhere. The interventionist policies he supports against Venezuela,

recognizing Wang Guaido, just agreeing with Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz on a litany of issues.

But we're going to start talking about something a little closer to home because one of the

points that we at moderate rebels talk a lot about at our work at the gray

zone we talk a lot about is how the wars abroad always come home that imperialism always blows back

at home and we've seen that in the past few weeks on of course January 20th on the inauguration

of Joe Biden there were more than 25,000

troops in Washington, D.C. Max published a video at the Gray Zone just looking at the hyper-militarized

situation in D.C. There were more troops deployed than all of the troops combined in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.

So the war really does come back home.

And now we've seen reports that because of the vague threat of so-called terrorism and this kind of new

internal war on terror, now we know that those, that at least 5,000

troops are going to remain deployed in Washington until at the least mid-March, if not later.

We'll see if that gets extended.

So we're just going to start today talking about the military situation.

Max lives in D.C. and David's also in the DMV area. So can you guys just

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