Notes

THRUSH: … Would you, for instance, if you had reasonable intel, would you have done the bin Laden raid?

JOHNSON: Yes. Yes, that was our goal. That was our goal from day one. Get bin Laden. He was responsible for this. Going into Afghanistan, initially, that was bin Laden. Yes. You attack the United States, we're going to attack back, and let's not label Libertarians as isolationists. Let's label them as diplomacy to the hilt, just smart about this.

THRUSH: So you're with Rand Paul, the sort of second iteration of Rand Paul's foreign policy of skepticism but in instances where, and you do believe ISIS is an existential threat to the country?

JOHNSON: Right, but how is it best, how is it best dealt with? Clearly, we cut off the head of Al Qaeda. Now we have ISIS. We go in, we take out Saddam Hussein. He's really the check when it comes to Iran. Now we're having to deal with Iran, where prior to that Iran's only concern was Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Unintended consequences relative to everything we do.

KIMBERLY ATKINS: And on that second point on terror, given what we saw happen in France yesterday what is your platform in terms of fighting terrorists?

JILL STEIN: Great. So, I’ll just say we have yet to understand fully what went on yesterday. It has many of the trademarks of a terrorist event but whether this was an extremely deranged and violent individual who had his own agenda, whether he was self-identifying with ISIS, we don’t yet know exactly the facts of the matter. But there is no doubt that this is related to the ongoing crisis of violence, of politically charged violence, and it’s global dimensions that is related to these wars and this so called war on terror.
I think this illustrates again that we need a bigger solution here and this happened in the midst of the state of emergency, so it’s an indicator that the state of emergency and surveillance and security measures by themselves are not the solution. We really have to address the driving forces here and we know that ISIS itself is an outgrowth of these wars that go back many cycles ultimately back to 9/11 and the beginning of this war on terror. But it’s acknowledged that these wars are not working and in fact with each cycle the terror becomes worse.

So it’s very important that we...I think number one we (unintelligible) to the Middle East. The U.S is basically applying a flame thrower by arming all sides and all combatants. We and our allies have actually been sponsors of terrorist organizations. You can go back to the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan which is where the whole so called jihad terror movement was started as essentially a U.S and Saudi strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union.
So very bad blood in here going back. Repeating the cycle of violence with more bombing and bullets doesn’t fix it. We need to create a weapons embargo. We need to stop funding that our allies in particular are providing. We cannot simultaneously fight terrorism while our allies are funding terrorism, arming terrorism and training terrorism. We need to get to the bottom of this and address the underlying injustices and inequities.

Jill called on congress to stop the shipments of arms to Sauna Arabia. "It is well known that the 9/11 Commission produced a report containing so many omissions and distortions that Harper's Magazine described it as 'whitewash as public service'—a document that 'defrauds the nation.'"

“Do I have issue with wiping out ISIS? If it involves boots on the ground, if it involves dropping bombs, if it involves flying drones, I think that all those methods have the unintended consequence of making things worse not better.

The way to beat a 10 foot wall with a 11 foot ladder! Gary is against the wall

Jill stein called them undocumented americans