Welcome to Keith's night, don't tread on anyone and the
libertarian Institute today, I am joined by Lori Calhoun,
senior fellow at the libertarian Institute and author of we kill,
because we can from soldiering to assassination in the Drone
age. Miss Calhoun.
Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for having me.
What is just War Theory and what can it teach us about?
How to determine the legitimacy of a current or future military?
Intervention, huh. Good question.
Just War theory is an apparatus devised by Catholic theologians
long, long ago, beginning with st.
Augustine in the fourth Century ad, and it was elaborated
further by other Scholars throughout the Middle, Ages up,
to st. Thomas Aquinas.
And even up to the present day, they're still Scholars, who are
tweaking it and what it does is it offers leaders a framework by
which to do Determine whether or not the wars, they Envision are
permitted or not, are they just or the unjust?
So the reason why this was important way back when when it
first was devised was because these people were Christians.
So if you're a Christian on the face of it, you can't kill
people, Thou shalt not kill. So they needed to have some
framework to make it possible for leaders who wanted to go to
war, to go to war. And so they devised.
These conditions, the use odd Bellum conditions on going to
war and the use in Belo conditions on conduct during a
war already. Wait, so in some ways, the
criteria are commonsensical. So legitimate Authority.
You have to be an illegitimate Authority in order to take your
country to war or to take your group tour.
It has to be a just cause you can't just go wage a war for
some random reason. The the means of War have to be
proportional to what you're trying to accomplish.
Okay? Other ones it.
Oh, a really good one. Is it has to be Last Resort.
Okay, so there, you have to have exhausted.
All other non War means to a resolution of the conflict
before you can go to war, according to traditional, just
War Theory. So and then, you know, once the
war is waged, there are there conditions.
You're To follow in in the war use in Bala which include
treating soldiers as human beings, not targeting
non-combatants. Treating captured soldiers as
though they were non combatants as though they were
non-combatants, okay? So they're no longer armed.
So they're the equivalent of non-combatants once they've been
stripped of their weapons. And so this little framework has
been used. It's been trotted out by
leaders. Throughout history to rap to, I
argue rationalize their Wars. So in my view, my rather
scathing critique of the just Worth area is called warrant
illusion. A Critical examination where I
try to show that rather than restraining leaders from waging
Wars which they should not be taking their groups into it has
served as a rhetorical. Propaganda apparatus to make it
easier to take people to war. So you just say, oh, you know,
this this is a just war did George h.w.
Bush. Famously did this before the
1991 Gulf War. He trotted out explicitly, the
theory and went down, the bullet points and said, you know,
Saddam Hussein committed this crime.
So this is a just cause we have to you know, free the Kuwaiti
land and Dress this wrong. That was done by said, emphasis
a and it's a last resort. We can't Resort we can negotiate
with him because he's a Madman. So the only thing we can do is
go to war, you know, it went on and on and on and so he got the
entire world practically behind that that call to war and can't.
Can it be used to help determine whether or not a war?
Is just I think if you actually read The requirements,
literally, it turns out that nearly none of the wars during
our lifetime certainly have satisfied, the criteria.
The problem is that the the the tenants of just War, Theory are
so malleable and there's a subject to infinite
interpretation and the ultimate problem is that the legitimate
Authority himself. Has the interpretive prerogative
about how to interpret every other requirement, okay?
So once you have a legitimate Authority name, Then he decrees
that this is a just cause from his interpretation and he does.
He decrees that, this is the last resort from his
interpretation and that the means are proportional.
And then he says, okay, look, we satisfied all these
requirements. Let's go.
So, you wrote a paper titled, how much violence breeds
violence. Some utilitarian considerations,
where you discuss important? Long-range consequences.
Rarely mentioned in utilitarian defenses of particular
decisions. To engage States in war the
reason. I think this is so important is
because the great propaganda trick is to assume no downsides,
we should defend Taiwan. We should defend Ukraine.
We should liberate Iraq. We should liberate Japan without
ever talking about the downsides.
There's no costs in this world. There's just a bunch of
benefits. And the question is, do you want
to have a bunch of benefits or you with the terrorists?
So when it comes to laying out the costs of War, What is the
utilitarian a case that utilitarian case against
military interventions? Okay, the utilitarian case is
very strong and it has to include what you just mentioned,
which are the long-term effects which are never ever ever
considered before going to war or if they're considered their
minimized and falsified by saying, oh, we'll be in and out,
okay, we're going to go in, we're going to remove Saddam
Hussein's weapons of message. Destructions and it will be out
of there and then Iraq will be free.
That's how its painted in reality as we saw through the
war on terror. That's never how it works out.
It works out that you end up killing, you know, millions of
people displacing Millions, more maiming million people leaving,
you know, thousands upon thousands of were orphans and
widows basically wrecking. The entire country, is what we
did in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and other places in the Middle
East. So, the utilitarian argument
against War would be You have to look at, not only the short-term
consequences of redressing, what you claim to be a wrong or
dealing with the problem that you need.
Need you believe needs to be resolved but also looking at the
long-term consequences and one of the long-term consequences
which I also discussed in the chapter on utilitarianism in war
and delusion which Which is really important is that you
have to look at the effect of normalizing violence as a means
to conflict resolution. So every time, your country goes
out and bombs just bombed to Smithereens a country.
You're saying to everyone that this is how you resolve conflict
and we see this, we see the consequences of this in the
Homeland. Every time one of these crazy
persons goes out and does a mass shooting, he has some grievance
and he's decided that the way you act on your unhappiness and
your your your dissatisfaction with some aspect of society is
you go kill a bunch of people. So so that is a really important
long-range consequence which is never taken into consideration
by either, short-term utilitarian advocates for war.
Or by just were theorists, you have been writing the the papers
I was looking at. Went back to the late 90s on
this issue and I was born in 96 and the biggest thing.
And my life was always about the terrorists and the terrorists
are going to come kill us and, and it's sort of random.
It's not like we see the Army coming over the hill.
It's like, the person next to you they could be in Afghanistan
or they could be in Phoenix, we don't know.
And this was one of the high alerts that we were always sort
of walking on eggshells around. And now that has like
disappeared from the headlines completely.
Now with Russia, now it's China, what happened to all of these
terrorists who wanted to kill us for our freedom?
Eames. Yeah, that's a really
interesting question. I think that the big mistake
post-911 is to cast the crimes committed on that day.
As acts of War. It was not a declaration of war.
It was, it was a group of crimes committed by a small group of
people, and in retaliation. This was used as a pretext for
waging, full-scale Wars on multiple Nations, throughout the
Middle East so that kept us pretty busy for 20 years.
And then Now we've moved on to other crises so we have the
covid crisis that detracted everyone and now because I guess
everyone was, you know, busy worrying about covid for two
years. Now suddenly Ukraine becomes the
big issue and Russia's invasion of Ukraine and our support of
the, you know, Ukrainian sovereignty with no apparent
memory of what happened throughout the war on terror,
okay? So, you see blinken coming out
and saying, oh, you can't just invade a country.
Tree but we just did that you know we just debated country
after country and of this is the same time that he's saying this
we're bombing places all over the Middle East continually so
we're still carrying out these drone strikes in Somalia
recently in Syria, etcetera. And so it's a real contradiction
because on the one hand, the the war machine is going on in the
background, okay? While Ukraine is on the front
pages. But in, in some ways, it's like
the attention of the populace has And switched.
So as to diminish the actual implications of our war on
terror for the conflict in Ukraine, When it comes to
normalizing violence, are you familiar with the Omar Mateen
situation at Pulse Nightclub? I mean, I think I know basically
this was this act that happened a few years ago, right?
Yeah. Okay.
I should have talked with you but no, I really.
I think they remember and I shouldn't have randomly.
No, it's okay. You can refresh my memory.
I mean, I recall that there were Is ways of interpreting it, but
what was your interpretation? Well for years, I had assumed
that this was a homophobic attack or a gay hate crime
because it took place at a gay nightclub the Pulse Nightclub
and I believe Orlando, Florida, 50 people were killed and then
some years later, Glenn Greenwald shares the 911,
transcript, and the transcript is high.
This is my name. Is Omar Mateen.
I'm with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
America needs to stop bombing Iraq and Syria.
You're killing women, and children, America.
And Russia are killing women and children.
He says this probably 10 times, I read it, and it was a little,
it was so repetitive that I just had to, like, cut some of it
out. I sort of brought that up with
you beforehand. I'm actually no.
But, you know, you're right. Actually, every domestic
territory. Okay.
Ace during throughout the war on terror involved, people who when
they actually, you know, made it to a trial and weren't just
whacked. They said that they were
retaliating to the Drone to the Drone Wars, to the attacks, on
civilians in Pakistan, and Iraq and Afghanistan.
And all of them said this, so he wasn't alone, you know, Anwar
al-aulaqi, who of course, was executed by a drone on.
I think September 30th, 2011, he also Against our Lawless,
assault of the people, on the people of the, the Middle East,
in the way that Osama Bin Laden. Did, you know before 9/11, which
is not to, excuse 9/11, of course, but it's to say that
these people all had Grievances and they followed the framework
established by our repeated, use of military force in addressing
conflict. All of them did.
So, what is Jihad? But the islamist version of just
War Theory. So we we have a grievance and
we're going to dress it and this is the only way we can do it,
you need to be prepared for Jihad and go out just in the way
that the just Warriors would say, so the very, they're
completely analogous. I mean, from the perspective of
the perpetrators of these terrorist acts, they're doing
what they have to do because they cannot stand by and
continue to watch what is going on.
You wrote a book, we kill because we can from soldiering
to assassination in the Drone age, which countries has the US
military used drone, strikes. Inand, for what alleged purpose?
Oh, all over the map, really a. So certainly all over the Middle
East, obviously Iraq. Afghanistan, Somalia Yemen,
Pakistan Syria all over North Africa to their drone bases.
Now, dotting Africa. So drones were launched from
these places and We don't know about all of them, we only know
about the ones they admit to, but the danger is, is growing
for people in countries which have yet to be democratized.
And the reason is, because the, the despots of these leaders are
able to use this drone technology to eliminate their
political enemies, it's actually kind of awful.
So, you know, we say that we're the champions of democracy, but
in fact, we're Force multipliers of tyrants all throughout the
Middle East. East.
Yeah. If it's so vitally important to
give a person a vote once every four years, I think not
murdering them would be a little more important.
We might want to put that above. Like, if I lost my right to vote
that you know, maybe I wouldn't be too happy if I were murdered.
I wouldn't have the ability to not be happy.
Can we have some standards? Yeah, I know that's it.
That's a really important point and people forget about that.
I mean when you just Let loose the dogs of war so to speak.
You're about to annihilate. People's basic, not only, you
know, rights to choice but their basic right to even have an
opinion. I'm so so, so you're basically
tossed out all of your principles.
Once you start just killing people willy-nilly because they
might possibly pose a possible future threat to your country.
I mean, it's wild what happened throughout the The war on
terror. I mean, we completely abandon
any notion of due process. Any notion of Carrying about the
human nature of our victims. Many of these victims as the war
on terror, progressed, the victims became younger and
younger. So, we were killing people, you
know, 16 year olds impressionable, teenagers, who
had joined up forces with the local terrorist group, because
they saw some child murdered by a drone, so that's why they
signed up. So, these people are not, most
of these people were not in any sense intrinsically evil.
They were angry. They were angry and they
retaliated because they Just as I said earlier, with regard to
the domestic terrorist cases, they couldn't stand by and do
nothing because they're so outraged by what happened and
it's a I think it's a tragedy. I argue is are you this at the
end of we kill because we can't it's a tragedy that we've killed
some of the brightest. And you know most promising
young people throughout the Middle East because they had the
Of moral outrage against The Invasion which in fact was the
invasions, which were in fact illegal.
So they were acting on their perception of the wrongdoing
that was being perpetrated by the United States.
And so they teamed up with the local thugs, which were usually
Isis, or Al Qaeda. And as a result, they were
killed What data do you have on the number of civilians,
civilian deaths when it comes to this drone program operation?
And in this case, for the sake of argument, a civilian would be
a death that occurred as a causal result of the Drone.
Who was not the intended target, any statistics on that there are
statistics and they vary widely depending upon the source, okay?
So, we know that thousands of people have been killed by
drones, so that's that's a given Obama admitted it in his report
in 2016 we have killed you know it was approaching 3000 in that
report. It's probably many times more
than that according to several different sources reprieve.
So etcetera, the problem is that the administration not only
killed thousands people but they redefined what constituted an
enemy killed in action. So an enemy killed an action
under the Obama Administration. Administration became any male
who was killed by a drone who was of military age.
And we know this thanks to the Whistleblower Daniel Hale.
Now serving a federal prison sentence.
We know that the United States government, effectively
inverted, the burden of proof and to find anyone that killed
as guilty until proven innocent provided.
They were within the, the age of military Capability.
So if they're like between the ages of 16 and 50, or something
or somewhere around there, then they were defined as enemy
killed in action when they were killed by drone.
So what's the upshot of this? It means that if there were
innocent teenagers killed by these drones, we don't know from
the administration because they claim that they are all
terrorists by definition. So your brown-skinned, you're 18
years old and you're in a place where they think terrorists are
hiding out, they kill you, they call you a dead terrorist.
What you become in effect? Convicted of terrorism through
State execution. So to answer your initial
question, we don't know how many civilians have been killed
because it depends on whether you deny the possibility of a
military-age male noncombatant in these areas, okay?
Because if you if you deny that possibility, then it looks like,
oh there are very there. Have been very few civilian
casualties if you recognize that, in fact, that's completely
bogus because these people are being killed on the basis of
circumstantial evidence. Is including bribed information,
derived from destitute, people who need money.
And also things like Drone footage and SIM card data which
is completely circumstantial would never hold up in a court
of law in the United States. Then you realize that lots of
these people probably were innocent another argument for
concluding that among the thousands of Target's who were
killed by the United States government.
According to the United States government itself, many of them
were innocent, a really strong argument for this is that the
men who were rounded up and thrown into guantánamo Bay
turned out, it turned out that 85% of them were innocent, okay?
So since they use the same kind of Intel to drop their Hit List,
you know, when they stopped imprisoning people and just
decided killed on capture. Will just kill everybody.
Since I use the same sort of Intel inde, I got hit list for
drone strikes as they did in rounding up.
The people who ended up in Guantanamo Bay, 85% of whom were
totally innocent. You have really good grounds for
believing. That lots of the people killed
by drones have been innocent when it comes to legitimate so
to speak. Target's when if you were having
to steal man the case for the Pentagon, what is something that
they would consider a really legitimate Target and a big
success? In the Drone program.
Well, they determined that someone is potentially Dangerous
by his associations with other people who have been determined
to be potentially dangerous. So this is a really slippery
slope and it the the problem is that there's a confirmation bias
going on. So they think that someone is
suspicious and then he acts in ways which are then interpreted
as suspicious and then they kill him.
So I really good example of this was the Drone Like on August
29th, 2021 in Kabul, as the US government was departing, they
killed this guy, who was driving around a white Toyota, Toyota
Corolla and doing stuff that quote unquote looked suspicious.
So he was like moving water and visiting people all over the
city and they killed him with a drone strike.
And along with him, nine other people, seven of whom were
children because they were in the vicinity and it turned out
that the guy was an aid worker. Are okay, but they had received
Intel according to it. Some guy driving, a white Toyota
Corolla was planning a strike on Kabul Airport.
So, this was the basis for their strike and they came out after
the strike and said, oh we got rid of this bad guy, we thwarted
an attack on the Kabul Airport. Turned out two days later,
journalists on the ground, ascertained that in fact, the
guy had no connection to terrorist groups.
In fact, he was an aid worker and the US government had no
knowledge of his existence the day before.
Are they? They killed him.
So so this shows you how flimsy, the evidence actually can be the
difference in this case and all the other cases is that there
were people on the ground who could offer a counter-narrative,
usually the Pentagon controlled the narrative.
So they said they killed somebody and it was like end of
story because there was no one on the ground to be able to you
know, deny what they said. And in this case because they
were withdrawing from Afghanistan, they no longer
control the narrative. And so the question is, how many
of the people who were killed throughout the war on terror,
were more like this Aid, worker? And, you know, who is for three
days claimed to be a dead terrorist.
In fact, completely innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever but
because of bad Intel he was pegged as a terrorist and then
they when they observed him from drones Etc, they interpreted
everything he did as suspicious. So to answer a question And
that's a good example of the type of Intel that has been used
to kill people. How many drones has the u.s.
government used? I remember thinking it was,
like, in the dozens, because I'd hear about it and I go, well, we
must be hearing about it because it's so seldom.
So, maybe there's one or two a year, or could it be as high as
hundreds, or are there, literally thousands of these
things happening and the news just would rather talk about
trivial nonsense. Well, certainly, I think we have
grounds for believing that they're happening more
frequently. Then we know about because the
Trump Administration stopped reporting on them.
Okay. So Obama used hundreds of drone
strikes, hundreds. He really upped the level, the
frequency of the drone strikes, he used hundreds of them and he
killed thousands of people. The Bush Administration used, I
think 50 and Obama use like maybe 500 and then Trump just
decided, you know, he decided it was tough to not like, like not
report on it, so they just didn't report it.
I, they put Jim Mattis. James Mathis on a A Long Leash
and he just got to do you know, it was a free-for-all throughout
the Middle East and no one. Really knows how many people
were killed during that period because the government stopped
reporting by Dan now is reporting, you know, when
there's a drone strike and they consider it to be a success.
So for example, the recent strike on Ayman al-zawahiri also
in Kabul about a year after this poor Aid, worker and his family
were all annihilate. Biden came out and said oh I
just killed this number to Al Qaeda guy in Kabul.
So so there the strikes were admitted when they look like
some sort of victory in the war on terror.
So Biden said, look you know I'm I'm as good as Obama he killed
Osama Bin Laden will I killed, you know I'm on although I hear
me, it's interesting case. I this was just this past
summer, I think it was July 30th interesting case because there's
no forensic evidence. They actually got this guy.
This guy has been reported dead before in the Pakistani press
and the Taliban upon the release of this news.
And there's the big Fanfare that the media gave Biden, you know?
Oh, he killed this evil guy. You know, they wanted to
recreate the feeling of the populace.
After Osama Bin Laden was killed, so they wanted sort of I
think improve his ratings, but in any event, the Taliban came
out and said, oh, actually that house was empty.
There was no one in it. So we still don't know to this
day whether or not this guy was killed by the the Biden
Administration but we do know that he bragged about it and it
was taken to be you know a proof that he's a great leader.
I guess that was like the marketing line.
Did they make sure to throw his body in the ocean afterwards?
Ya know if they killed knowing there was nobody, the
alternative is they killed their hapless Aid worker?
Or someone else who happen to be in the house.
But since there's been no forensic evidence produced
whatsoever. I mean, I think that if there
were a body, there would have to be DNA evidence confirmatory, or
dis confirmatory one way or the other.
I mean, especially the US government has been hunting this
guy for 20 years. So they surely have DNA
evidence, I mean, you know, some sort of Trace from a glass that
he cup he drank out of whatever, they've got to have DNA evidence
and if in fact he was who they said he was.
Then there would there would be forensic evidence but the
Pentagon itself said we don't anticipate having, you know,
being able to share any forensic evidence.
Well, there's nobody then there is no forensic evidence.
So so I mean basically there are two options either the Taliban
is right. You know, you never really liked
to believe the Taliban but it's their country now and they said
there was no one in the house and there's if there's no body,
then No forensic evidence. If there is a body and it wasn't
all and it wasn't, I'm on, I was already read that.
It was someone else and presumably someone's husband or,
you know, child and so there's got to be DNA evidence, DNA
evidence of, that person's identity.
So there there has to be DNA evidence.
If in fact, there was a body but we have heard nothing about
this. It just sort of, you know, we
just moved on something else, you know, Putin is Hitler, you
know. So The latest.
You mentioned Daniel Hale. Are there any other drone
program whistleblowers that people should look into if they
want to get? Hopefully the most accurate
least popular information about this issue.
There have been quite a few drone operators who have come
forth. There are some good documentary
films on this and there's A group of apostate drone
operators who abandoned the profession because they couldn't
do it. Morally speaking anymore, they
just couldn't do it. I have an article about this at
my blog. It's called chew him up and spit
him out the Drone operator Edition, and it actually gives
some links to some of these people.
Michael has is one of them Chon. Westmoreland I'm not sure
actually how to pronounce that name.
I think it's an Irish name. See I am, how do you pronounce
that? So anyway, he's very active on
Twitter and So these are people who have come out and said, you
know this is like so wrong. We're just like killing people
and they basis of circumstantial evidence and I'm not going to do
it anymore. Brandon Bryant is probably the
most famous of them. He came out back in 2012 after
having served as a drone, operator for five years and he
just he went all over the place. He was in Der Spiegel.
Did interviews in Germany, Norway all over the place.
I have not heard anything from him, you know, in a couple of
years. Now, I don't know where he is,
he was in Montana for a while but He was really good about
coming out and just explaining his experience how, when he left
the program, he was presented with a scorecard indicating that
he had contributed to the deaths of 1626 people.
And he has nightmares about this now because he has memories of
cases where he was ordered to kill to do a strike where there
was a small, what looked like a small child in the room.
And, and his supervisors would say things like, oh no, that was
a dog. But he has incredible.
An incredible sense of guilt and moral injury for what he did.
You know, he went into it thinking that he was going to be
defending the country. And he also was, it was painted
when they recruited him as a kind of James Bond thing.
Like who, you know, I'm going to be this cool guy, saving the
United States and then he came out of it feeling like, wow, I'm
like a contract killer. I just kill people at the order
of the customer and there have been other drone operators.
More recently have come out and elucidated that they're told
that they have to kill whomever quote-unquote, the customer says
needs to be killed, so the customer I mean, who's the
customer? You know, it's like some group
of anonymous analyst, who have decided that they want to rack
up some more dead terrorist and so their criteria are going to
depend on their own moral views, you know, they may have no
problem with killing lots of people, just to up their tally.
I know you wrote a book, titled philosophy, Unmasked A Skeptics
Guide from a philosophical standpoint.
Who do you think holds more moral culpability the order
Giver or the order follower in those situations?
Yeah, it's it's a tough question.
Because soldierly obedience is Justified tactically to keep
everyone in the platoon alive. So, so people think actually
that they have to follow orders because if not, they're going to
endanger their buddies. The interesting case with drone
operators though is that it's no longer the case that their lives
are on the line. And so, in this case, I think
that the moral responsibility is born by by the There, who, can,
who's days in the job, because of lucrative, even though he
believes in his heart of hearts, that what he's doing is wrong,
it has become more of a case of corruption where people are
agreeing to do this. In the way that hit, man will
agree to kill someone. Provided that the amount of cash
being offered him is large enough.
So it's completely analogous because the Drone operators are
not themselves risking their own lives, they're not soldiers.
In the traditional sense because their acts of killing cannot be
construed. As literal acts of self-defense,
a combatant on the ground who's facing a deadly Enemy enemy,
who's about to kill him, can regard what he's doing as a
choice of kill or be killed during operator, cannot do that
because it's false. If the Drone operator declines
to push a button, He's not going to be harmed, he's in a trailer
in Nevada or wherever he is. So so it's not a question of
kill-or-be-killed. It's a question of should I do
what these people are telling me to do even though it goes
against my conscience. Yeah and it will be even the
mafia isn't able to take people's income by 4.
So they have more voluntary funding and the mafia generally
have a rule that they don't go after family members.
So I think this is like the worst thing in the world and I
think You're doing a phenomenal job.
Tackling this this vitally important issue.
We've gone over the results of the war on terror.
We've gone over the motives for originating it and just War
Theory as well. We've talked about the effects.
Are there any other bullet points that people need to know
about the war on terror before it completely is memory?
Hold, and we forget it ever happened.
Well it cannot be memory. Hold.
I mean it's it's been put on the back burner now by the media but
Have to remember that the media has been completely co-opted by
the military. It's a part of the sprawling
military-industrial Congressional academic.
Did I say media pharmaceutical banking with just because I have
eight of them. It's an octopus Aid in my view
now. So so in completely co-opted, so
when you, when you turn the television on, you are facing
propaganda at this point and it's largely driven by the, the
military. So, Also Farm what we learned in
the period of covid. So so we should.
We cannot memory hole it and and people I wish we had a competent
fourth estate to to call into question, when people like
blinken, get on the stage and say, you can't just invade a
country and, you know, as those other one turned ever happened,
you know. So none of this happened and
then on top of all that they're trying to memory hole literally
Julian Assange and everything that Julian Assange revealed.
I mean nothing. Nothing would memory hole the
war on terror better than the annihilation of Julian Assange.
And that seems to be what their goal is at this point.
They've managed to suppress him to the point where he can't he
can no longer reveal any of the sort of secrets that make it
possible for you. Not United States citizens to
know what their government is doing supposedly on their behalf
and using their money. So a good example would be Nord
stream. We don't know who sabotaged the
Nord stream Pipelines. But if we had a whistleblower
who came forward, who was a part of it and could provide
documentation showing like look these people actually
perpetrated this. If it was the United States, for
example, then it was a declaration of war on Russia and
without people like Julian Assange, we're never going to
find out because anyone who dares to speak out is going to
be thrown into federal prison. I mean some people might dare do
it anyway but it's they also risk their own lives by doing
that. And so So we need more people
like Julian Assange and organizations like Wikileaks.
And we need to I think defend Julian Assange at this point.
Because without that Surrogate for the fourth estate, which no
longer exists. We no longer have an effective
press, then we really are lost because we're going to be just
in this tunnel of government produced disinformation and
never know exactly what is going on, which is where we seem to be
right now is it's quite frightening to be honest.
When it comes to solutions to what something like this
marriage, a reward. I really like her idea of what
if you just started issuing these as court cases and you
tried taking soldiers or generals or politicians to to
court and trying to file a lawsuit as a way of bringing
attention to it and maybe some heroic judge, for example, maybe
Joe Biden conspiracy to commit murder in Kabul Aug 29, And one,
I mean, something like that. I mean, I love that.
We're getting this information out there and people are, you
know, becoming more skeptical of the military industrial complex
and the state and everything. But as far as like what do we
have to do to get this nightmare to end their provoking a war
with China over Taiwan there provoking one with watch.
Look like if inciting a riot, I'm against inciting riots,
that's bad. These people are inciting
nuclear mass murder. And they like, Like they get
applauded by the Council on Foreign Relations for it.
So as far as sizing it where do we go?
Okay, so my ladies are called The Institute is in a nutshell
to save the Republic abolish. The black budget.
So basically the black budget is being used to perpetrate crimes
which actually harm the Republic.
Okay. So if we are risking nuclear
war, let's say for the sake of argument that Nord stream was
U.s. sabotage. If that was done using taxpayer
money, is that taxpayers money? Then we are being sabotaged by
the existence of the black budget because these things can
be carried out without our permission, without our
knowledge, without any accountability, and they can
actually lead in this case to nuclear Holocaust.
So something's got to be done to rain these people in because
they obviously are completely unhinged, it's a complete, you
know, Loose Cannon at this point, the fact that were
fomenting War on multiple fronts, okay, not only with
Russia in Ukraine, but also between China and Taiwan.
And also with Iran's simultaneously, it's in it's a
complete train wreck in terms of diplomacy, we no longer have
diplomats what we have, our war mongers masquerading as
diplomats, they refuse to negotiate.
Well, when you refused to negotiate, what you're doing
getting back to the just War theory, is you're saying O War
as a last resort? We can't negotiate, so we have
to go to war and It's a fallacy, it's completely false.
It were not able to negotiate because you don't want to
negotiate. We're now why they want to do
this, you know, this is up to interpretation.
Some people think it's just a matter of profiteering.
Okay, we want to keep doing the wealth transfer from citizens to
the micu. So all these weapons that are
going to to Ukraine. In fact, you know, that's a lot
of profit for the for-profit military industry and if they
want to stretch it out as long as They can problem in this case
is there actually risking the annihilation of Civilization by
doing this because they keep goating Putin to the point where
he met. Let's hope not but he made some
point, just throw up his hands and say, whatever you know,
let's do this, we don't know. But when you continually
threatened him with regime change and even assassination,
then you have removed. All of the constraints in place
for Maad mutually assured destruction.
Which You know, supposedly is what prevented nuclear war
throughout the Cold War. Because each side knew that if
they if they initiated the war then they would also be
destroyed. Well, if Putin already thinks
he's going to be destroyed, then that whole framework falls apart
and made you no longer works. So, to answer a question, the
way to get out of this nightmare is to rein in these people who
are committing crimes in secret their fomenting Coos inciting
up. Risings committing, you know,
flat-out crimes in the case of Nordstrom I believe and causing
us all great danger rather than protecting us.
They're actually degrading our our state of security.
And in fact, causing a huge amount of misery.
I mean, lots of people are really worried about this now
because it just doesn't seem like there's anyone really in
charge, anyone competent in charge.
They have no idea what is going on, why this continues on and
why A congress continues to allow the government to print
money and ship it abroad, even as our own economy tanks.
It's unbelievable, really. And it can only be explained by
the fact that the media has been captured by the military.
So, the media, you know, if you're watching television, you
are getting a really distorted view of the world and my one,
hope on the international front is that Countries in Europe are
finally going to say, wait a minute, these like basket cases
are actually endangering us. Not only are they preventing us
from getting energy for this winter?
They're actually provoking the possibility of a nuclear war and
it's possible. I'm and I believe that the
people of Germany, for example, are all on On the whole
irrational lat and at some point they're going to say, you know,
align ourselves with his, this Loose Cannon is not helping us
anymore. And so we may see new alliances
forming in the region as the people stand up and say no, we
won't allow our government continue to support initiatives,
which are clearly against our own best interests.
The book is we kill because we can from soldiering to nation in
the Drone age. Thanks to everyone for watching
the libertarian Institute, Miss Calhoun.
Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for having me.