Laurie Calhoun | The Libertarian Institute

Drone Assassination: Inconvenient Facts

by Laurie Calhoun | Aug 2, 2022 | Blog, Foreign Policy

On the assassination of Ayman al-Zawahiri by U.S. drone in Kabul (from Accuracy.org): [Laurie Calhoun] said today: “President Biden has pivoted from the multiple crises of his administration — inflation, heightened tensions with China and Iran, and even the very real risk of nuclear war with Russia — to announce that he authorized the drone strike killing in Kabul, Afghanistan, of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of the masterminds behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Twenty years and millions of ruined lives later, the Biden administration wishes to claim the summary...

The MIC Cult

by Laurie Calhoun | Aug 1, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

One of the most fascinating features of religious cults is that their tenets are impervious to empirical refutation, or even disconfirmation. Every apparent exception to the reigning narrative, every refractory datum, has a ready explanation compatible with the story already believed by the cult members. The teachings are in effect metaphysical, which is why the group is able to continue to recite what they regard as “the gospel” no matter what transpires. Conceptually trapped within a fantasy world of their leader’s creation, the acolytes have been indoctrinated to believe that their leader...

RIP Shinzo Abe

by Laurie Calhoun | Jul 8, 2022 | Blog

Former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated yesterday, in a country with a long history of nonviolence post-World War II, which Abe himself attempted assiduously to reverse. Hegemonic Spread and Lethal Creep: The Case of Japan

A MAD Heist

by Laurie Calhoun | Jul 5, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Wars are fought by leaders who intend to win, one way or another, using any and all means available to them. The Cold War was a decades-long series of proxy battles between the two nuclear-armed superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, during which the communist and capitalist arch enemies engaged in conflict on the terrain of lesser states, to the detriment of millions of civilians living in those places. But the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. and the fall of the Berlin Wall ushered in neither a period of world peace nor a dramatically reduced U.S. military budget. Instead, U.S....

Minimizing Risk and Maximizing Lethality: This Is Your Security Force

by Laurie Calhoun | Jun 9, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

On May 24, 2022, eighteen-year-old Salvador Rolando Ramos murdered twenty-one people, including nineteen young children, at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The horror of what unfolded over the course of seventy-five minutes is blamed by activists on the fact that guns are readily available to miscreants. But the guns held by the local police were not used to stop the killer until he had already committed mass murder. Parents at the scene of the crime have reported that when they rallied for the police to storm the building, they were accused of interfering with a security operation...

The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act: From Propaganda to Censorship to Tyranny

by Laurie Calhoun | May 18, 2022 | Featured Articles

Spectacle and theater have come to dominate the political arena today, even more so than ever before. Politicians are now celebrity oligarchs, who use tax revenues to promote their pet projects, and to enhance their personal investment portfolios, while pretending in scrupulously orchestrated performances to care about the populace from whom all of the money they squander is siphoned. Congresspersons who issue dire warnings about global warming jet across the world for photo ops with President Zelensky in Ukraine. The provision by the federal government of Peloton bicycle memberships to the...

Smart War Disinformation and the U.S. Military State

by Laurie Calhoun | May 4, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Drone killing has long been billed by the military as a cleaner, smarter way to conduct war. The standard marketing line has been that with drones it is possible to neutralize even elusive enemies such as factional terrorists while sparing the lives of innocent persons, and without sacrificing any soldiers at all. The most effective propagandist throughout the period when drone assassination was redefined as “targeted killing” and normalized as a standard operating procedure was John Brennan, who served as Barack Obama’s drone killing czar before being promoted to the position of CIA...

America’s Exceptional Amnesia (About Those War Criminals…)

by Laurie Calhoun | Apr 13, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

The top-ranking U.S. diplomat, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, recently denounced Russian president Vladimir Putin as a war criminal, which has resulted in a marked uptick in the usage of that term throughout the media. Putin decided to invade Ukraine in February 2022 and has killed people in the process. That’s what happens when leaders decide to address conflict through the application of military force: people die. The U.S. government has needless to say killed many people in its military interventions abroad, most recently in the Middle East and Africa. Yet Americans are often...