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unidentified
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And civic leader David Rubinstein. | |
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| Welcome back. | ||
| Joining us to discuss the U.S. military response against drug cartels is Ivan Eland. | ||
| He's director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute. | ||
| Ivan, welcome to the program. | ||
| Thanks for having me on. | ||
| Tell us about the Independent Institute and your funding sources. | ||
| Well, we're a libertarian think tank or a, if you will, a market liberal think tank. | ||
| And in California, I don't work in the California office, but I'm affiliated with the Institute. | ||
| And we get our funding from a variety of sources. | ||
| I'm not even sure where we get our funding from, but we get different people give us contributions, and that's how we're a nonprofit. | ||
| And that's how we don't express a partisan viewpoint at all. | ||
| And what's your institution's, your institute's view on foreign policy? | ||
| Well, we tend to be more restrained in our views about foreign policy. | ||
| We think that excessive wars leads to bigger government and a distortion of the American checks and balances system, which is what my book is about. | ||
| The fact that the domestic, there's been many domestic causes of war and many domestic ill effects of war throughout U.S. history. | ||
| And so this is the primary reason that we take the view that we do, that war is the biggest source of big government in world history and in U.S. history. | ||
| And that book is called Domestic Causes of American Wars: Economic and Political Triggers. | ||
| I forgot to mention that you are the author of that book. | ||
| I want to ask you about the headline of your article that you wrote for Independent Institute, and it says, Illegal and Ineffective: The Constitutional Peril of Trump's Anti-Drug Military Ops. | ||
| I want to break that down into first the illegal part of that. | ||
| How are these boat strikes illegal, in your opinion? | ||
| Well, to make the strikes, you either have to have due process or you have to have congressional approval of the strikes, and neither one has happened. | ||
| So, basically, you're killing people and you don't have the authority to do it. | ||
| Normally, when we have drug traffickers, we have the Coast Guard or if the Navy picks them up on the high seas, they're taken and put into a judicial process where they have due process and they're potentially arrested and taken to the proper law enforcement authorities. | ||
| It's a law enforcement issue. | ||
| It's not a situation where the military kills people who are doing this. | ||
| In fact, some of these people who have been Killed are peasants or farmers who are poor and they accept money from drug traffickers to use their boats to traffic drugs. | ||
| And they're not professional cartel members or whatever. | ||
| Now, they're still doing something illegally and they should still pay a price for that. | ||
| But are they really, should they really be killed? | ||
| We don't have a death penalty for drug trafficking in the United States. | ||
| And so it's probably, these small boats are probably a law enforcement issue. | ||
| And we don't have, we're certainly not at war with the drug cartels because we don't have any sort of congressional approval for this. | ||
| So these boat strikes are clearly illegal and they're unconstitutional because we don't have either a declaration of war or some other approval from Congress to do this. | ||
| Now, we have a general drug war since the 1970s, but that's not an official war. | ||
| So, Ivan, recently the U.S. has delegated the Cartel de la Solas of Venezuela, a foreign terrorist organization. | ||
| Doesn't that cover your concerns about legality? | ||
| Doesn't it make it legal to the law says that you can, with organizations that are so designated, you can increase economic sanctions, but it doesn't authorize military force. | ||
| And we have no authorization for that. | ||
| And as an aside, that terrorism list has been a political document for a long time. | ||
| What we're seeing, drug trafficking, as horrible as it is, is an economic crime. | ||
| People are out to make money. | ||
| The terrorists like Al-Qaeda and ISIS, they're out to kill people to make a political statement. | ||
| And terrorism has always been the use of violence for political ends. | ||
| And these are economic crimes, and they've always been separate until this year when the Trump administration put these eight groups on the list, the terrorism list. | ||
| And I don't think they should even be on the list. | ||
| Now, if you want to take military action, that's fine, but you need to get some sort of authorization from the Congress to do so. | ||
| Now, the administration would argue that these are terrorist organizations, and the terrorism stems from the drugs coming into the United States destabilizing the political system of the United States. | ||
| Well, there's violence associated with the drug trafficking. | ||
| That's usually between the two, between the groups or groups and foreign governments. | ||
| And yes, drugs are bad. | ||
| They come into the United States, but we've been fighting this war, as I mentioned, since the 1970s when Richard Nixon started the drug war, the anti-drug war, I should say. | ||
| But it's failed. | ||
| We still have, despite all the military and police action, we haven't had very much success in stopping it. | ||
| And the reason for that is the Latin American countries are right that it's U.S. demand for drugs. | ||
| And a counterintuitive solution to this problem is legalizing drugs for adults. | ||
| We have more people killed in this country from the abuse of legal drugs than we do illegal drugs. | ||
| That doesn't mean illegal drugs are not a problem, but I think we need to deal with it differently. | ||
| And this would be legalization only for adults, not children. | ||
| But then you invest in prevention ads and saying how the addiction is really bad and also the prevention or excuse me, the treatment of drug addicts. | ||
| And I think that's the way to go. | ||
| So Ivan, you would advocate then legalizing all drugs, heroin, cocaine, crack cocaine, opioids? | ||
| Well, I would certainly decriminalize it. | ||
| And I think they're moving towards that on marijuana for some time. | ||
| But I think also this war has been so militarized and such a failure that we're dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into military and police solutions to this. | ||
| And the economics are simple. | ||
| The reason for all the violence is because it's illegal and it raises the price. | ||
| And you can make enormous profits by drug trafficking. | ||
| And that's why these poor people in Venezuela and other places are doing this because they need the money and that sort of thing. | ||
| So they draw in poor people and other people who are willing to traffic this stuff. | ||
| And then you have the cartels, which do use violence. | ||
| And the way to do this, it's very counterintuitive. | ||
| And I know there's a lot of pushback when you say you need to legalize this stuff. | ||
| But there's a lot of things that are like organized crime makes money off, if you stop to think about it, things that maybe shouldn't be illegal in the first place. | ||
| All right. | ||
| If you'd like to join our conversation with Ivan Eland, you can do so. | ||
| We're talking about the use of the U.S. military in the drug trafficking in the Caribbean and the Pacific. | ||
| You can call us on our lines by party. | ||
| Democrats are on 20248-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents 202748-8002. | ||
| The second part of your headline here is ineffective as far as the military operations go against drug cartels. | ||
| Why do you believe they've been ineffective? | ||
| Have we seen any effect so far on these actions from these actions? | ||
| Well, they've killed 83 people in small boats. | ||
| I mean, you're not going to make a dent on the drug traffic by that type of thing. | ||
| This is really a four-show exercise. | ||
| And Trump is not the first president to do things like this for demonstrative purposes rather than actually doing it. | ||
| Only 5% of most of the cocaine is produced in Colombia. | ||
| 84% of the cocaine that comes into the United States is from Colombia. | ||
| 5% of what they of Colombia produces goes through Venezuela. | ||
| It's just a trickle. | ||
| So what this really is, is a pretext to put more pressure on the Maduro regime to overthrow them. | ||
| And I think that's misplaced too, because I don't think, I think we have to go back in both the drug war and this military action against Maduro. | ||
| I think we have to go back and ask a basic question, which is never asked, what is the specific national security threat to the United States? | ||
| You've had the drugs coming in for years, and it's not good. | ||
| But there are other solutions besides this. | ||
| And the drug war is a canar in this case because what they're trying to do, they're doing it off Venezuela, which is not the problem. | ||
| It's Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia that produce cocaine. | ||
| And if you're going after fentanyl, the precursors come in from Asia and their labs are in Mexico. | ||
| And so, you know, what they're trying to fight, and it's this cartel de Solas, the cartel of the Sons, refers to military people in Venezuela who are on the drug trade. | ||
| Well, that's true, but it's not really even an organized cartel. | ||
| And so this is all a pretext to put more pressure on the Maduro regime. | ||
| And I'm not sure why there's many leaders in Latin America that are involved in the drug trade. | ||
| And he has gotten sideways, Maduro has gotten sideways with the Trump administration and other U.S. administrations as well because he's a socialist and he's ruined his economy. | ||
| But is that really a specific threat to the U.S. economy? | ||
| Excuse me, to the national security of the United States, it's not. | ||
| And the polling indicates that 70% of Americans don't really think that we should take military action against Venezuela. | ||
| And when you say that the Trump administration is doing this for show, isn't that part of the issue, though, that this would be deterrence? | ||
| So if you saw that there are these boats that are being blasted, then you would be less likely to be transporting drugs into the United States on those boats. | ||
| Well, of course, those boats are not transporting any drugs into the United States. | ||
| You know that for sure, Ivan? | ||
| Well, that boats are going across the top of, yes, boats are going across the top of South America, likely taking cocaine to the east of Venezuela. | ||
| And as I say, most of the routes are, those boats are not on the routes that come to the United States. | ||
| All right, let's talk to callers. | ||
| We'll start with Steve in Erie, Pennsylvania, Independent. | ||
| Good morning, Scott. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, good morning, everybody. | |
| Just real quick, first, I feel once a person is saved and allows God in their heart, they cannot have a desire to kill or have hate in their heart. | ||
| You answered a lot of questions. | ||
| And I like people that are real on there and are straight. | ||
| It is against the Constitution. | ||
| It's in the Constitution due process for everybody, not just Americans. | ||
| And it is the Fifth Amendment. | ||
| No person should be deprived of life, liberty, and et cetera. | ||
| I appreciate the people on here that are real. | ||
| I don't like the games that are played by people who sometimes get on here. | ||
| Trump did say what about a year ago, he feels like we should do like what China does, kill drug dealers. | ||
| I hear stuff straight out of Trump's mouth, and people don't seem to believe it, but he actually said that he thinks drug dealers should be killed. | ||
| And I don't understand that because I know the higher-ups and people that have money, they do drugs. | ||
| They do Coke. | ||
| That's their drug of choice. | ||
| And they do it. | ||
| I know they do. | ||
| All right, Scott. | ||
| Ivan, your comments on due process for everybody, not just Americans. | ||
| Well, just because Trump says that, so that's what the leader of the Philippines said that they should kill drug dealers. | ||
| And he actually did it in his home country. | ||
| And he's in trouble on human rights violations and everything else. | ||
| Yes, we need due process for everybody. | ||
| We even need due process for terrorists because sometimes wrong people are selected. | ||
| They've produced no evidence that any of these boats were drug trafficking. | ||
| Now, maybe they were. | ||
| But even if they were, is the death penalty the right thing to do? | ||
| Because these are not probably not high-level drug traffickers. | ||
| They're people who've been recruited to do this and they're desperate for money. | ||
| Some of them, who knows? | ||
| They may have some kingpins in the boats. | ||
| But this is not going to be a major way to restrict drug traffic. | ||
| And I'm not sure it's really going to deter that much since the profits are so high. | ||
| I mean, they've tried everything for 40. | ||
| We've been trying this for 40 years and more than that, actually, I think 50 years now. | ||
| And it hasn't worked. | ||
| So maybe we should try something different. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| Here's Robert in New York, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| Yes, I just more or less have a question or a statement and a question. | ||
| You said that you have no idea who funds your institute. | ||
| To me, that seems crazy. | ||
| And another thing, how do we know that you're not funded by someone that wants to do damage to the United States, like maybe a George Soros or something like that? | ||
| And if you don't know who you're funded by, we really can't trust what you say. | ||
| All right, Robert. | ||
| Any comment, Ivan? | ||
| Well, actually, I think it's an advantage because the analysts are separated from the funding. | ||
| But I assure you, we don't get any money from George Soros. | ||
| I can guarantee that probably. | ||
| But just by our philosophy. | ||
| But I'm not necessarily against all of Trump's policy. | ||
| I think him paying more attention to the Western Hemisphere is good. | ||
| It's just that he's approaching it in the wrong manner. | ||
| So we're usually pretty independent in our thought, and we don't really take money from the right or the left. | ||
| A lot of times the people who donate to us are just individuals who donate most of it. | ||
| Here, Shirley in California, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Shirley. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| I kind of agree with the previous caller. | ||
| I could not trust this guy as far as I could throw him. | ||
| California legalizing just marijuana enticed illegal grows. | ||
| I lived in Northern California to the point where it has just been uncontrollable. | ||
| Destruction of our youth and to legalize drugs is just a crazy notion. | ||
| It destroys society. | ||
| I don't know where this man comes from. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Did you have something else, Shirley? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sorry. | |
| No, no, thank you. | ||
| Okay, go ahead, Ivan. | ||
| Well, I mean, we tried illegalizing alcohol in the 1920s and early 30s, and that was a disaster. | ||
| And the reason is because there was still a high demand for it. | ||
| And most economists, I think, would probably agree with me that this is the way to go. | ||
| Now, it's an unpopular thing, but it's becoming more popular. | ||
| As I say, they're decriminalizing marijuana. | ||
| And marijuana is a fairly mild drug compared to these others. | ||
| But the principle is the same. | ||
| You have to, if you're going to have a, you have to come up with a better solution than the one we have because it's not working. | ||
| If you can come up with a different solution, but bombing people on a pretext, we're discussing the drug war, but that's not really the issue here. | ||
| The issue is we have all sorts of military assets. | ||
| I think 12 ships down in the Caribbean right now. | ||
| And they're saying that there may be military action against Venezuela. | ||
| That has nothing to do with the drug war, or at least very little to do with the drug war. | ||
| And it has more to do with the fact that we want to take out a Latin American leader. | ||
| And yes, he has ruined, he's a socialist and he's ruined the economy. | ||
| But the real question is, do we really need to do that for U.S. national security? | ||
| The drugs coming in are certainly a health problem. | ||
| And They do you, some of our youth do do those drugs, but is that really a national security problem? | ||
| Is the country going to fall apart doing that? | ||
| No, but it's been happening for 50 years and the drug war hasn't worked. | ||
| I want to play you a short portion of Senator Lindsey Graham on the Senate floor. | ||
| He was arguing a couple weeks ago about giving President Trump the authority he needs for these strikes, and then I'll get your reaction to it. | ||
| We could cut off funding. | ||
| The Constitution reserves the right of the Congress, beginning in the House, to appropriate money. | ||
| So if there's a military engagement out there, you just pick the topic. | ||
| And as a member of Congress, you think America should not be in this conflict constitutionally. | ||
| You could terminate funding. | ||
| And that would be a constitutional check and balance on the president's ability to use military force. | ||
| The second thing you could do as a member of Congress, if you thought the president was doing something wrong by using the military, is you could do an article of impeachment, somehow create a high crime or misdemeanor that the use of force in this circumstance is a high crime and misdemeanor and impeach the president. | ||
| Those are two things that Congress can do to check and balance a president. | ||
| The one thing we can't do, in my opinion, is to substitute our judgment for that of the commander-in-chief about a military operation. | ||
| Because if that's the case, then you don't have a single commander-in-chief, you have 535 commander-in-chiefs. | ||
| There's never been in the history of the country a termination of military activity based on the idea of Congress did not approve it. | ||
| What do you think of that, Ivan Eland? | ||
| Well, first of all, the last statement is not true. | ||
| Congress cut off the funding for Cambodia, the war in Cambodia during the Vietnam War. | ||
| And the second thing is, he's right. | ||
| You could take those actions, but that's after the fact. | ||
| The Constitution, he's unfamiliar with the Constitution, apparently, which says that Congress declares war. | ||
| And that's before the fact. | ||
| Congress initiates war. | ||
| And the commander-in-chief, once that war is initiated, then we turn it over to the president, who's the commander-in-chief. | ||
| Now, that's not done anymore. | ||
| He's correct, but we're so used to the fact that the president gets to decide when we go to war or not. | ||
| The founders would just fall over dead if you said that to them. | ||
| That's why they put the declaration of war in the people's house, because those were elected by the people. | ||
| And they did that because they saw European monarchs take their countries to war. | ||
| And who bore the cost, both their lives and money, was the common people. | ||
| And they did not want that. | ||
| They were very clear about that. | ||
| Even Alexander Hamilton, who was the most ardent proponent of executive power at the founding, he said in the Federalist that initiating war was clearly a congressional duty. | ||
| And we haven't done that since World War II. | ||
| And all the presidents since then, not just Republicans, but Democrats and everybody else, they've been askew of that. | ||
| He also mentioned the possibility of impeachment. | ||
| And since you believe that these strikes are illegal, do you think this is an impeachable offense? | ||
| Well, of course it is, but many presidents have, when Obama attacked Libya, he didn't get a declaration of war. | ||
| That was an impeachable offense. | ||
| So presidents of both parties have been, You know, would be able to be impeached for that. | ||
| We've had a lot of impeachable offenses, and we've never had impeachments for them. | ||
| So, yes, he's correct. | ||
| You can cut off the funding, which Congress did in one case, and you can't impeach them. | ||
| But we've gotten into this habit of saying, well, the president can do anything he wants if we want to go to war, even small wars or big wars or military actions. | ||
| But those should be approved by Congress simply because there's no emergency here. | ||
| The emergency has been, if you want to take them at face value, which I don't, that it's for the drugs, the drugs have been coming in for 50 years. | ||
| And so, even longer than that, but we've had a drug war for 50 years. | ||
| But this is clearly directed at Maduro, and he has no authority to do that. | ||
| Now, if he went to Congress and they said, well, we want to do this, most of the time Congress unfortunately caves in. | ||
| But he needs to do that because you just can't start bombing countries just because you're the commander-in-chief. | ||
| The commander-in-chief was originally that role was very narrowly construed. | ||
| The president has the constitutional ability to defend the country if there's an emergency and Congress is out of session. | ||
| Well, Congress is hardly ever out of session nowadays, like it was back in the beginning of the country. | ||
| But certainly the president could defend the country even against nuclear attack still under the Constitution. | ||
| But this is an offensive war, and those have to be approved by Congress, either with a declaration or with some legislation, as was done after 9-11. | ||
| Carol in Elgin, Texas, Independent Line, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning, Mimi. | |
| Good morning, C-SPAN. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Thank you for the guests. | ||
| I just think we're being really disingenuous with this argument about the drug trade. | ||
| This has very little to do about the drug trade. | ||
| I agree with your guest that this is a these shooting up these boats and things like that. | ||
| This is for show on the American TV networks because what's really going on is the amount of oil that Venezuela has under the ground and how much of that oil is being exported to other countries, not us. | ||
| And so I think 80% of their oil exports are going to China or something like that. | ||
| And you saw conflicting policies come through over the summer from the White House, from Trump, about, well, we're not going to allow Chevron to export oil out of Venezuela. | ||
| Oh, well, now we're going to allow Chevron to export oil. | ||
| And you've seen a bunch of flip-flops on that. | ||
| But this is about the oil that Venezuela has under the ground and who's going to control it. | ||
| And the problem that we have is we have a bad history in Latin America, especially these countries, because capitalism and the brand of capitalism that we practice down there and that we've brought down there hasn't always been good for the people. | ||
| And that's why you saw the socialists able to take over in Venezuela. | ||
| And they were successful for a while, but then the price of oil dropped. | ||
| And so now you're going to see an opportunistic thing where we shift our focus away from Europe, away from the wars in Ukraine, away from Middle East, and we start focusing on the South so that we can get control of that oil field down there in Venezuela. | ||
| It's going to be really risky. | ||
| You know, I want everybody to remember what Colin Powell said about going into Iraq and about going into the Middle East with troops the way we did. | ||
| And that is, once you go in, it's like a bull in a China shop. | ||
| Once you go in, you own it. | ||
| And we don't really have a very good record about holding up the human rights of the common people in Latin America. | ||
| So I think we're being disingenuous to say, oh, this is going to be about drug trade. | ||
| Yes, there's tremendous drug trade. | ||
| But if you want to go in and go after that, then you're going to have to take control of Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador right now. | ||
| There's a tremendous amount of risk there to sit there and say we're going to go after the drug trade when, in fact, you're really just interested in the oil that Venezuela has on the ground. | ||
| I'd like to look to your sure. | ||
| And I just want to show people what you're talking about. | ||
| This is the Washington Examiner Besant, Scott Bessant, that's the Treasury Secretary, says oil prices could drop further if, quote, something happens down in Venezuela. | ||
| He said these comments on Fox News on Thursday. | ||
| Go ahead, Ivan Eland. | ||
| Well, war usually, particularly if you're fighting against a major oil producer, and Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world. | ||
| Yes, the caller is correct. | ||
| Oil is always in the background of these things. | ||
| But we're not going to be able to take over the oil militarily. | ||
| And we don't even have enough forces, although we have significant forces. | ||
| We're not going to be able to. | ||
| I hope they don't invade Venezuela because I think they're going to have another Iraq situation on their hands with the guerrilla activity and whatnot. | ||
| I wrote another new book, A Balance of Titans, where I would applaud Trump's more focus on the Western Hemisphere. | ||
| Now, I don't agree with him using troops here at home to police cities, but I do think that we need to worry about more about Latin America than other places that we have been worrying about, like the Middle East. | ||
| But the idea that we're somehow going to control the oil trade with military power is or affect the oil price with military action. | ||
| That usually drives up the price when there's a war involving an oil-producing country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, Scott Desant, Ivan? | |
| Usually happens. | ||
| As far as having a more friendly producer of oil, he's a socialist who's ruined his country and they have tremendous, could have tremendous oil industry. | ||
| Perhaps having a less violent stance or bellico stance towards him, why not buy his oil? | ||
| We did before. | ||
| And it's not, you know, we buy products from China. | ||
| They're a communist country. | ||
| Free trade sometimes helps in the long term, I think, you know, make countries more open to things. | ||
| And so certainly he's not doing well by the Venezuelan people. | ||
| And if they overthrew him by either street demonstrations or a coup on their own, that would be fine. | ||
| But I don't think our military threatens are, I think, have a rally around the flag effect usually. | ||
| And so a lot of times we work in a counterproductive fashion in Latin America by being too heavy-handed. | ||
| We've had the Monroe Doctrine since 1823. | ||
| And in the 20th century, we had a lot of military interventions in Latin America, and they really were counterproductive. | ||
| And I think you can get more by trading with countries, no matter who they are. | ||
| I'm not for a borrow-going Cuba either. | ||
| I think that these countries, they're no threat now after the Soviet Union went away. | ||
| These countries are no threat to U.S. security. | ||
| And this is what Andy said on X. | ||
| He said, a caller presented a thought. | ||
| Those boats are twin-engine boats and don't have enough fuel to make it to the U.S. | ||
| They have to refuel somewhere. | ||
| So if we can blow them out of the water, why can't we track them and detain them? | ||
| The boat has to stop somewhere at some point. | ||
| Let's hear from Susan in San Diego, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Susan, good morning. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| We are fighting the war on drugs on the wrong front. | ||
| You cannot win the war by eliminating the supply. | ||
| You have to eliminate the demand. | ||
| How do you eliminate the demand? | ||
| You make using people who use drugs social pariahs. | ||
| Make it so socially unacceptable to be a drug user that people won't do it. | ||
| They need to be treated as lepers were treated in the Bible. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Any comment, Ivan? | ||
| Yeah, I think he's absolutely correct. | ||
| Not only social disfavor, but also, remember smoking. | ||
| Everybody smoked in 1960. | ||
| And then people can make decisions based on information. | ||
| And I think more awareness and more saying this is really awful. | ||
| You can really get addicted, have better drug programs in schools saying, you know, you can't, you know, this may sound like a great idea, but you can get really addicted to this and you can't get off very easily. | ||
| And, you know, if this were brought home, I think investing resources in that is better than wasting hundreds of billions of dollars trying to go after the supply. | ||
| You really do need to address the demand. | ||
| That was the central point, I think, the caller, and I think he's absolutely correct. | ||
| I want to ask you about that video that Democratic lawmakers put out. | ||
| They are lawmakers with military and intelligence backgrounds, and they were urging the troops not to obey illegal orders. | ||
| This is, I'm going to play you a portion of one of those lawmakers that Senator Alyssa Slotkin of Michigan. | ||
| She was responding to President Trump's statements on that on ABC yesterday. | ||
| Take a look. | ||
| So for me, my primary concern is the use of U.S. military on American shores in our cities and in our streets. | ||
| We've seen now the courts overturn the deployment of U.S. military into our streets, including here in Washington, D.C. When you look at these videos coming out of places like Chicago, it makes me incredibly nervous that we're about to see people in law enforcement, people in uniformed military get nervous, get stressed, shoot at American civilians. | ||
| It is very, a very, very stressful situation for these law enforcement and for the communities on the ground. | ||
| So it was basically a warning to say, like, if you're asked to do something, particularly against American citizens, you have the ability to go to your JAG officer and push back. | ||
|
unidentified
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And with these service members calling you, couldn't you have done a video saying just what you just said, if you are asked to do something, if you are worried about whether it is legal or not, you can do this. | |
| It does imply that the president is having illegal orders, which you have not seen. | ||
| I think for us, it was just a statement widely, right? | ||
| We say very quickly and very to all the folks who come to us, this is the process. | ||
| Go to your JAG officer, ask them for explanation for top cover for their view on things. | ||
|
unidentified
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We do that on a case-by-case basis, but we wanted to speak directly to the volumes of people who had come to us on this. | |
| Ivan Eland, she was speaking about American citizens, but in this case, obviously those that are being fired on are not American citizens. | ||
| She was advocating that you go and talk to your JAG officer, which is your Judge Advocate General. | ||
| What are your thoughts on that? | ||
| And what would JAG officers say in the case of those Bose strikes? | ||
| Well, unfortunately, we've become so inured to the fact that the Commander-in-Chief can order illegal wars that the JAGs probably would say that's okay. | ||
| Now, the JAGS might not approve of domestic use of force because that's against the posse comitadas law. | ||
| And we've had that since the late 1800s, where we don't mix law enforcement and military action. | ||
| And that's on purpose. | ||
| Military people are trained to kill, and they should be, because if we get into a war, we want them to fight. | ||
| We want them to fight hard. | ||
| And that doesn't mean they can slaughter civilians wantonly, but certainly a war is different than law enforcement. | ||
| Law enforce policemen and women, they have to be more selective in their use of force. | ||
| They use force only as a last resort. | ||
| And so when you have military people on the streets for no reason, which is what we have now, or trumped up reasons, if you'll pardon the pun, you know, this is against the policy comitatus law and it's against U.S. tradition. | ||
| And I think a lot of Republicans are even nervous about these types of things because the Republicans used to object to this wholeheartedly when any time this was done. | ||
| And it wasn't done very often. | ||
| The last previous time was done in Los Angeles during the riots there. | ||
| And that was done when the governor requested it. | ||
| And the legislature, either the governor or the legislature has to request it in a state under the Constitution for this to happen. | ||
| The reason they put that in there, they turned down a proposal at the Constitutional Convention to just say, well, the federal government can come in and police any state that's acting up or whatever. | ||
| And they turned that down. | ||
| So in the Constitution, the governors or legislatures are supposed to request this. | ||
| And as far as foreign wars, if they had more people going to their JAG officers and saying, well, flinking these boats or threatening and taking military action against Venezuela, I'm uncomfortable with that because it's not authorized. | ||
| And in the case of the boats, there's no due process either. | ||
| So, you know, they might have, you know, if military people started doing that, it may have an effect. | ||
| On the line for independence in Philadelphia, Michelle, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi. | |
| I agree with your guests on almost everything. | ||
| And I think, you know, it's very important that we realize that the American people realize that people are being killed on the high seas at the behest of the President of the United States. | ||
| And, you know, I think people need to understand that there was a coup in Chile in 1973. | ||
| And the United States was complicit. | ||
| And people died. | ||
| Americans died. | ||
| Chileans died. | ||
| You know, and international people died too during that. | ||
| And I don't think we want to see that happen again in Venezuela. | ||
| Ivan Eland. | ||
| Well, yes, El Ende coup in 1973 was at the behest of Richard Nixon. | ||
| And we've done the Guatemalan coup was at the behest of Eisenhower, which I think was a mistake. | ||
| We don't need to meddle anymore that we don't have a hard Cold War where if there's any leftist regime down there, and Nicaragua is probably, and Cuba, of course, are probably more socialists than even Maduro. | ||
| I mean, Cuba is a full-blown communist dictatorship, but Cuba is no longer a threat to the United States. | ||
| Maybe we should try something new there, try trading with it to open it up, that sort of thing. | ||
| We have the luxury of doing that, and there's really no need to use such military power. | ||
| In my book, The Balance of Titans, I say, yes, we should concentrate more on the Western Hemisphere. | ||
| And if something comes up, we need to maybe use the military in certain rare instances. | ||
| But I think we should go back to Hoover's and FDR's good neighbor policy, which had remarkable, remarkably good effects in preventing Latin America from supporting Hitler during World War II. | ||
| And I think my mother always used to say, you get more with sugar than vinegar. | ||
| And I think we probably should approach that. | ||
| I think Trump is right to focus more on our Western hemisphere and less on, like I say, the Middle East. | ||
| But I think he needs to probably take a softer line than he's taking. | ||
| Well, speaking of the Middle East, we are going to be taking viewers right after this program. | ||
| We're standing by for the UN Security Council meeting to discuss Israel and the Palestinian question. | ||
| And we will take you there at the end of this program. | ||
| So stay with us for that. | ||
| Meanwhile, we will talk to Ed in York, Maine, Independent Line. | ||
| Ed, you're on with Ivan Eland. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, thank goodness the C-SPAN. | |
| I'm wondering how the AUMF fits into this. | ||
| I found it interesting that Lindsey Graham did not mention that, repealing that as one of his solutions to this problem that we could do or that Congress could do. | ||
| If you could elaborate. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, Lindsey Graham's always been really excited about using military power anywhere we can. | ||
| Now, the AUMF that we had in 2001 against the Al-Qaeda, it was supposed to be, it was written right in the law, you're authorized to use military force against the perpetrators of 9-11 and those who harbored it. | ||
| That means Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. | ||
| Well, they stretched that to plinking any terrorist group in the world. | ||
| And that was clearly a violation. | ||
| And the Congress, Congress is a lot of times at fault for not doing anything about this. | ||
| And Lindsey Graham is saying the Congress could do this and do that. | ||
| And he's right about that part, that the Congress could do these things. | ||
| And if a president got impeached or the funding cut off, they would. | ||
| And Richard Nixon did react to the threats of funding cutoff in the Vietnam War. | ||
| So if the Congress did do more, the Congress did not enforce the AUMF and they let not just the Bush administration, but Obama and subsequent presidents go all over the world and just go after terrorists. | ||
| And in fact, Obama actually killed a terrorist with no due process. | ||
| We've been down this road before, killed two American citizens, a guy and his son, and they were probably members of al-Qaeda. | ||
| But did they get any due process? | ||
| No. | ||
| So if we have a license for the president to go out and kill people without due process, and there's no war, it's different in a war. | ||
| If you declare a war, you have approval from Congress for a war, then anything goes, right? | ||
| You shoot, you don't deliberately shoot civilians, but if there's any sort of threat at all, you can shoot people. | ||
| But you're not supposed to do that at peace. | ||
| And we don't have a war declaration. | ||
| And the AUMF does not cover anything outside Al-Qaeda and Taliban, technically. | ||
| And the Congress never enforced that. | ||
| And so they would probably try to use that. | ||
| And I think they may be trying to use that because they're declaring Maduro and this alleged cartel del Solas, which is not really a cartel at all. | ||
| They're doing that to probably use the AUMF as a justification. | ||
| But as I say, that's very questionable. | ||
| And they probably should have repealed that long after the war against Al-Qaeda is over. | ||
| On the Republican line in Anaheim, California, Kurt, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Good. | ||
|
unidentified
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Happy Thanksgiving to you. | |
| That's coming up soon. | ||
| You too, Kurt. | ||
| Go right ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hey, I just want to let everybody know: you know, drugs are bad. | |
| You know, I think it's really supply and demand. | ||
| If we can help lower the demand, the need, the supply will shift and go elsewhere. | ||
| I grew up around drugs. | ||
| My son overdosed with heroin, but he came back, went to fentanyl, came back. | ||
| I'm surprised I'm still alive. | ||
| I did everything but heroin, thank God. | ||
| And it was just on the streets all the time, you know, where I grew up. | ||
| And today I'm going to have back surgery. | ||
| I'm having a cyst removed. | ||
| I have my bones fixed, and I'm no longer a drug user. | ||
| I'm no longer an alcoholic, especially up to today. | ||
| Thank God for just the opportunity and the surge. | ||
| And so I just want to share with everybody as a parent or as a friend, if you can help someone reduce their need for a drug, replace it with something better, I promise you, man, it will help lower the need for people moving drugs and having to do things like we're doing. | ||
| But I think what Trump's doing is good because you got to go after it. | ||
| You got to hit it hard. | ||
| It won't be pretty old and clean. | ||
| We'll make some mistakes, but gosh darn it, we've got to do something to fix this country in all countries. | ||
| It's just so we can just lower the need and the want for drugs and alcohol. | ||
| Got it, Kurt. | ||
| And a quick response, Ivan? | ||
| Well, I really commend the caller for changing his life and that of his son. | ||
| And I think he's right about working on the demand side. | ||
| We really need to do that. | ||
| And I'm just saying all this action on the supply side has never really been working for 50 years. | ||
| So we have to come up with something better than that. | ||
| And I think also, again, we're using this as a pretext to take out Maduro in this case, because Venezuela is not the drug probe. | ||
| If you want to go after the source, you go after Mexico for fentanyl and you go after Colombia for cocaine, and that's what you do. | ||
| But it's still not going to work military-wise. | ||
| And I'm not advocating that, but they're going after the wrong person. | ||
| The whole thing doesn't pass the smell test. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And that's Ivan Eland. | ||
| He is a director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute. | ||
| He's also author of the book Domestic Causes of American Wars: Economic and Political Triggers. | ||
| You can find them at independent.org. | ||
| Ivan, thanks so much for joining us. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington, D.C. to across the country. | |
| Coming up this morning, we'll talk about the mood of the nation with pollster, author, and communications strategist Frank Luntz, and the Navy Federal Credit Union's Heather Long discusses economic conditions in the U.S. and concerns about an AI bubble. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal joined the conversation live at 7 Eastern this morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| Friday, on C-SPAN's Ceasefire, at a time when finding common ground matters most in Washington, host Dasha Burns sits down with Cornell West, Union Theological Seminary professor, and Robert George, Princeton University professor, for a civil dialogue on rising political polarization in the U.S. and top issues facing the country. | ||
| Bridging the divide in American politics. | ||
| Watch Ceasefire Friday at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| House Majority Whip Tom Emmer and RAMP CEO Eric Lyman talk about innovations in financial services and how policymakers and entrepreneurs can collaborate better. | ||
| This discussion is part of the National Resilience Summit in Washington, D.C. Of course, we have here with us our House Majority Whip leader, Republican Tom Emmer. | ||
| Thank you again. | ||
| And Eric Glyman, who is the co-founder and CEO of RAMP, which is one of the companies that we've invested in. | ||
| And I'm also to say I'm a happy user at General Catalyst. | ||
| So, Eric, thank you. |