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.