Speaker 1: I'm on a group text thread with producer Colton and
Speaker 1: my buddy Jonathan Keller that we're sort of the team
Speaker 1: that puts together Right to Life Radio, which is my
Speaker 1: show that I host here on Power Talk in Fresno
Speaker 1: on Saturday mornings from nine to ten. It's produced by
Speaker 1: Right to Life Radio. And I am the ludite of
Speaker 1: the group. Colton is very very much a techie guy,
Speaker 1: Jonathan very much a techie guy. Both of them are
Speaker 1: big Apple fanboys. Every new iPhone that comes out there
Speaker 1: on top of it, you know, they're on it like
Speaker 1: white on rice. And one of the ways in which
Speaker 1: I am most a luddite is my general attitude of
Speaker 1: despising new developments in the realm of artificial intelligence chat, GPT,
Speaker 1: all of these different manifestations of AI that you're seeing
Speaker 1: now being promoted in various kinds of contexts, whether it's
Speaker 1: helping people to write stuff, whether it's helping people to
Speaker 1: you know, help. Basically, one of the main uses of
Speaker 1: AI is helping students to cheat by writing exams for them.
Speaker 1: But then businesses try to I don't know, it's like
Speaker 1: this this or eg earnest desire to just want to
Speaker 1: be in on the next cool thing, the next cool
Speaker 1: tech thing, and want to be like, oh, I'm doing
Speaker 1: this thing too, I'm utilizing this thing. And it seems
Speaker 1: like everyone is looking at AI and trying to think,
Speaker 1: is there some way I can shoehorn this into my
Speaker 1: business because it's the cool, hip, trendy thing to do.
Speaker 1: And I have found most of the uses of AI
Speaker 1: to be stupid. I don't like it. I dislike what
Speaker 1: it could mean down the road for all kinds of industries.
Speaker 1: I think anyone in the radio industry should look at
Speaker 1: AI with with deep suspicion. I think that, you know,
Speaker 1: I think that certainly. My sister is an animator who
Speaker 1: works for Disney, and she's worked on a bunch of different,
Speaker 1: you know, prominent Disney animated films, and she and the
Speaker 1: union she's a part of is very very concerned with AI.
Speaker 1: Writers in Hollywood very concerned about AI replacing all their jobs.
Speaker 1: Animators very concerned about AI being utilized to sort of
Speaker 1: replace their jobs. I basically and generally, I just dislike
Speaker 1: the idea of outsourcing our brains to something else. For
Speaker 1: so much of this stuff, I just feel like it's
Speaker 1: things that our own brain could do on its own
Speaker 1: if we just did a little more work. I sort
Speaker 1: of there's this one part in The Lord of the
Speaker 1: Rings where and JR. Tolkien is I think, Jerry. It's
Speaker 1: sometimes in life you come across someone who you think
Speaker 1: is so right about so much and grasps the truth
Speaker 1: so clearly, whether maybe it's in your field or something,
Speaker 1: that you just kind of become that person's disciple. And
Speaker 1: Tolkien is that person for me. He has this one
Speaker 1: section in The Lord of the Rings where the characters
Speaker 1: the Hobbits come home at the end of their adventures
Speaker 1: to the Shire and they see that some bad stuff
Speaker 1: has happened. One of the bad characters, Sarah Man, has
Speaker 1: clandestinely slunk back to the shire and is sort of
Speaker 1: ruining it out of spite. And one of the things
Speaker 1: done was creating a new Instead of the river houred
Speaker 1: mill that was used for grinding wheat, they produced some
Speaker 1: new monstrosity with wheels and engines that was billowing smoke,
Speaker 1: and the Hobbits sort of looked at it with disgust
Speaker 1: because it was needlessly complicated, noisy, pollutive, and technologically advanced
Speaker 1: when they had no more wheat to grind than they
Speaker 1: had before, and a lot of AI feels to me
Speaker 1: like that scene. A lot of AI feels to me
Speaker 1: like this isn't making your problems simpler. This leads me
Speaker 1: to a story about California public schools. Now, if there's
Speaker 1: any kind of entity that you can really really snooker
Speaker 1: into wasting a bunch of money on some dumb tech project,
Speaker 1: government entities are probably a good bet, and school districts
Speaker 1: probably are a pretty good bet. For this story from
Speaker 1: cal Matters, California's two biggest school districts botched AI deals.
Speaker 1: Here are lessons from their mistakes with all the hubris
Speaker 1: of a startup founder. Alberto Carvallo, the superintendent of Los
Speaker 1: Angeles Unified School District, took to the stage in March
Speaker 1: to launch ed the chatbot. He told parents and students
Speaker 1: it had quote the potential to personalize the educational journey
Speaker 1: at a level never before seen in this district, across
Speaker 1: the country, or around the world. No other technology can
Speaker 1: deliver real time on this promise, he said, we know
Speaker 1: it will succeed. In June, after only three three months
Speaker 1: and nearly three million dollars, the district shelved ed following layoffs.
Speaker 1: Of more than half of the staff at all here
Speaker 1: the startup company that made this controversial AI, Assistant district
Speaker 1: spokesperson Britt Vaughan refused to answer questions about the bots'
Speaker 1: performance or say how many students and parents used it
Speaker 1: before the shutdown. Also in June, and AI controversy unfolded
Speaker 1: in San Diego, where school board members reportedly weren't aware
Speaker 1: that the district last summer bought a tool that automatically
Speaker 1: suggests grades for writing assignments actually grades for writing assignments.
Speaker 1: The dust up began after Point Loma High School teacher
Speaker 1: Jen Roberts told Cal Matters that using the tools saved
Speaker 1: her time and reduced burnout, but also gave students the
Speaker 1: wrong grades sometimes times. A week later, Voice of San
Speaker 1: Diego quoted two members of the school board saying they
Speaker 1: were unaware the district had signed a contract involving AI.
Speaker 1: In fact, no one on the board seemed to know
Speaker 1: about the tool, the media. The news outlets said since
Speaker 1: it was included as part of a broader contract with
Speaker 1: Hofton Mifflin that was approved unanimously with no discussion, alongside
Speaker 1: more than seventy other items. None of those school board
Speaker 1: members responded to cal Matter's request for comments. San Diego
Speaker 1: Unified School District spokesperson Michael Murrad said that since AI
Speaker 1: is a quickly evolving technology, quote, we will make an
Speaker 1: increased effort to inform more members of additional relevant details
Speaker 1: related to contracts presented to them in the future. Mistakes
Speaker 1: in LA and San Diego may trace back to growing
Speaker 1: pressure on educators to adopt AI and underline the need
Speaker 1: for decision makers to ask more and tougher questions about
Speaker 1: such products before buying them, said people who work at
Speaker 1: the intersection of education and technol Yeah, no kidding, here's
Speaker 1: a tough question. Why even go down this road? Sorry,
Speaker 1: our kids in LA Unified doing so well that we
Speaker 1: have the time to spend on such time and money
Speaker 1: to spend on such luxuries as AI chat bots to
Speaker 1: assist parents see this is the most common use of AI.
Speaker 1: The most common use of AI that I've seen has
Speaker 1: been for tech support, help support, customer support. And it
Speaker 1: frustrates me to no end because inevitably AI sucks at that.
Speaker 1: You know what you need, you need a human being,
Speaker 1: and companies providing some form of customer service for their products.
Speaker 1: You know whether it's a school district trying to help
Speaker 1: parents navigate something with their kids' education, which purportedly is
Speaker 1: what this, uh, the chatbot that la Unified was trying
Speaker 1: to do. Whether it's that or just you know, me
Speaker 1: trying to figure out some PayPal thing that I'm trying
Speaker 1: to set up for my business. This I encountered this
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks ago. I was trying to set
Speaker 1: up something with like a PayPal charitable account for it
Speaker 1: was either for Right to Life or for Obria, And
Speaker 1: I was having all these problems with it, and I
Speaker 1: try to like, how do I call a human being
Speaker 1: to ask them what the problem is? And what do
Speaker 1: I get directed to? Well, I get directed to an
Speaker 1: AI chatbot, and I tried to describe the problem. They're there,
Speaker 1: and they're they're all hyping up a.
Speaker 2: New AI cutting edge PayPal AI chatbot help answer your
Speaker 2: questions for your problems. Ooh, super slick, super smart AI.
Speaker 2: That's what's gonna help you solve your problem? What is
Speaker 2: your problem?
Speaker 1: John? So? I type in my problem and it immediately says, sorry,
Speaker 1: we cannot help you with this concern. We do not understand.
Speaker 1: Our AI brain cannot handle your incredibly commonplace problem, and
Speaker 1: then they have to wait for someone to actually call me.
Speaker 1: So that's the thing that the most common use of
Speaker 1: AI is for customer service concerns, and inevit it invariably
Speaker 1: sucks at that. But it's also like the idea. This
Speaker 1: story from San Diego unified that teachers were using AI
Speaker 1: to grade written exams or written papers like essays and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. And so this teacher tells cal Matters, Oh,
Speaker 1: it helps me avoid burnout. Everyone's burnout, burnout, Pull up
Speaker 1: your socks, put on your big boy pants. Jeez, luise,
Speaker 1: you're a teacher. The job of being a teacher means
Speaker 1: grading essays. That's the job. If you're not gonna do that,
Speaker 1: And this teacher saying, well, it helps me avoid burnout,
Speaker 1: but you know, God forbid, I have to do my job.
Speaker 1: But it does sometimes give kids the wrong grade. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's given every kid the wrong grade. What so you
Speaker 1: just sort of use this and then when a kid
Speaker 1: comes to you and says, hey, this, you gave me
Speaker 1: a D on this paper. I think it was better
Speaker 1: than a D, Like like, what are you doing? Oh,
Speaker 1: so you'll you'll bump up the grades that it wrongly
Speaker 1: gives a low grade to But kids who are given
Speaker 1: an A for you know, some low level effort, you're
Speaker 1: not going to adjust those I'm pretty sure. So half
Speaker 1: of these kids are going to get overinflated grades because
Speaker 1: it was an AI bot thing that graded their paper
Speaker 1: rather than a human being who can exercise judgment. Also,
Speaker 1: by the way, probably half these kids are using AI
Speaker 1: themselves to cheat to write the stupid essays. So I
Speaker 1: find Look, if private businesses want to utilize AI in
Speaker 1: various ways to some extent, that's up to them. But
Speaker 1: I do not take a totally libertarian approach to this stuff.
Speaker 1: I think AI has all kinds of capacity to massively
Speaker 1: disrupt the economy. And I'm not using that word favorably. Okay,
Speaker 1: Sometimes people are like, oh, he's an economic disruptor. A disruptor. No, Like,
Speaker 1: if you're going to introduce AI whole sale into some industry,
Speaker 1: that's going to result in a whole bunch of people
Speaker 1: being laid off. That's a question for the government to
Speaker 1: maybe step in and sort of approach this and regulate it. Yes,
Speaker 1: the federal government can approach this, Okay. If AI is
Speaker 1: directly impacting part of interstate commerce. That is something that
Speaker 1: Congress should get involved in. If it's impacting businesses within
Speaker 1: the state of California, it's something that the state legislature
Speaker 1: should get heavily involved in. All right, Sorry, Libertarians, I
Speaker 1: think it's okay for the government to make laws about
Speaker 1: things because I I just genuinely think people matter, people
Speaker 1: working jobs matter. There is an economic there is constantly.
Speaker 1: What we're seeing in our changing tech logical landscape is
Speaker 1: a constant desire on the part of corporations to go
Speaker 1: from American workers to foreign workers, whether foreign workers who
Speaker 1: come across the border to get here, or foreign workers
Speaker 1: working at a call center in India somewhere, or moving
Speaker 1: to factory from America to China to zero workers. And
Speaker 1: that move Libertarians often herald as, oh, well, well, if
Speaker 1: they couldn't get the same work for cheaper price, that's
Speaker 1: the invisible hand of the market. That's fine. Meanwhile, the
Speaker 1: Midwest manufacturing blue collar sector is completely devastated. The impact
Speaker 1: of this on our country. Over the last forty years
Speaker 1: of jobs moving away from America moving overseas, are supply
Speaker 1: chains becoming more reliant on China. There are macro serious
Speaker 1: problems that occur as a result of the micro individual
Speaker 1: decisions of these companies to shift away from American workers.
Speaker 1: If those kinds of shifts happen in the realm of AI,
Speaker 1: I think it is equally concerning. All right. When we
Speaker 1: returned out, I'll go back to talking about education and
Speaker 1: my rant about all technology in education that is next
Speaker 1: on the John Girardi Show. Story from cow Matters. You
Speaker 1: can get it go twitter dot com, slash Fresno, Johnny
Speaker 1: at Frozno. Johnny tweeted about it from my Twitter account
Speaker 1: about how LA Unified got basically blew three million dollars
Speaker 1: on some useless AI chatbot. San Diego Unified apparently was
Speaker 1: paying for an AI tool that allowed teachers to grade
Speaker 1: written assignments like essays and stuff without having to do
Speaker 1: any work, and it was giving some students the wrong grades.
Speaker 1: And it makes me think more generally about technology and education.
Speaker 1: And you know, as for our context, the Girardi family,
Speaker 1: we are homeschooling the Girardi School. Oh home Learning just
Speaker 1: kicked off its twenty twenty four twenty five school year
Speaker 1: on Monday because Holly was sick and tired of these kids.
Speaker 1: It's too hot for them to really play outside for
Speaker 1: much of the day because it's like one hundred and
Speaker 1: ten degrees outside and people were whiney, and so Holly
Speaker 1: was like, that's it. These people are doing school. So
Speaker 1: we've got fourth grade, fourth grade, Maddie third grade. So
Speaker 1: what are we fifth grade? Fourth grade? Anyway, We've got
Speaker 1: eight year old Maddie. No, we got nine year old Maddie,
Speaker 1: seven year old Sophie, six year old Jack getting started
Speaker 1: with school, first, fourth and fifth grade. That's what we are. Okay,
Speaker 1: there we go first, fourth and fifth grade and our
Speaker 1: home schooling. It's not like we're zero tech involved. We're
Speaker 1: you know, we're doing homeschooling through like a public charter thing.
Speaker 1: So I think Maddie and Sophie have like a Chrome
Speaker 1: book that they can use. It's mostly we are trying
Speaker 1: to teach the girls how to type, you know, make
Speaker 1: sure that they can learn how to type decently well.
Speaker 1: And they have used the chromebooks for like one or
Speaker 1: two assignments. But they're ninety nine nine percent of their
Speaker 1: work based on the curricula that we are employing for them.
Speaker 1: It is not going to be based in computers. It
Speaker 1: just isn't it. Doesn't need to be this urge by
Speaker 1: public school districts to and private schools. This afflicts private schools,
Speaker 1: Catholic schools. I've seen this throughout the region, this urge
Speaker 1: to want to have technology for all the kids, like
Speaker 1: in mandatory that all the kids have to have a laptop,
Speaker 1: mandatory that all the kids have to have an iPad.
Speaker 1: I just don't like it. Like, like, I remember there
Speaker 1: was a one private school K three private school locally
Speaker 1: that was advertising the fact that every kid's gonna have
Speaker 1: an iPad for school. I'm like, wow, I don't want that.
Speaker 1: That seems like a terrible idea. I just find this
Speaker 1: so unnecessary. Yes, kids should learn to type, but you
Speaker 1: know what's at the end of the day not gonna
Speaker 1: kill a third grader is writing a five paragraph essay
Speaker 1: out by hand. It's not gonna kill her. And also,
Speaker 1: you know what the benefit is when you have to
Speaker 1: write out an essay by hand. It helps actually develop
Speaker 1: your skills with handwriting, teach the kids cursive, et cetera.
Speaker 1: I just find the rush the need to utilize technology
Speaker 1: in education. I just don't think it has almost I
Speaker 1: just don't think it has much of a benefit at all,
Speaker 1: and you look at educational outcomes from today versus forty
Speaker 1: years ago, and clearly we're not moving in the right direction.
Speaker 1: It's not like, you know, we've adopted how many millions
Speaker 1: and millions of dollars of technology, or let's just look
Speaker 1: at any individual kid. Okay, in the state of California,
Speaker 1: we now spend over twenty thousand dollars per student per
Speaker 1: academic year. That's a tax burden. It's over twenty thousand
Speaker 1: dollars per student per year for a California public school,
Speaker 1: and a lot of that is paying for teachers and administrators.
Speaker 1: But there's also all this technology apparatus in schools that
Speaker 1: are being sustained, and I just don't think it's really helping.
Speaker 1: And so I guess when I hear of school districts
Speaker 1: blowing money on AI chatbots and AI grading tools and
Speaker 1: how can we integrate AI, when really it just seems
Speaker 1: like this is like the current fad, This is like
Speaker 1: the current exciting thing that's happening in technology, and these
Speaker 1: school districts just want to be cool. They want to
Speaker 1: be like, oh, we're in on the game. Why the
Speaker 1: task of teaching this second or third grader his multiplication
Speaker 1: tables has not changed over the last seventy years. He
Speaker 1: doesn't need AI, he doesn't need laptop, he doesn't need
Speaker 1: any extensive technology. We just find it so frustrating when
Speaker 1: I look at the incredibly low tech fashion in which
Speaker 1: my kids are learning just by homeschooling through the charter
Speaker 1: school that you know, the charter school, which gives us,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a great deal. I mean, it's a
Speaker 1: public school, but they give us broad discretion with the
Speaker 1: approval of you know, the teachers who are sort of
Speaker 1: supervising it, to pick our own curriculum. So we were
Speaker 1: able to pick this really good curriculum, solid kind of
Speaker 1: more classical based curriculum. We can buy religion books and
Speaker 1: stuff on our own on the side, and we're so
Speaker 1: we're able to buy a great curriculum that gives the
Speaker 1: kids a huge emphasis on reading, on writing, learning how
Speaker 1: to write. My fourth and fifth grade are starting Latin
Speaker 1: this year. I can I mean, I have the benefit
Speaker 1: that I was Latin major in college, so I can
Speaker 1: teach them. And it's so low tech, and my kids
Speaker 1: are doing great, like they're real smart cookies. There every
Speaker 1: standardized tests, there are always ninety whatever percentile, like it's
Speaker 1: not a high tech thing. And the school district gives
Speaker 1: us thirty two hundred bucks per kid per year for
Speaker 1: buying books and educational materials, and you know, and the
Speaker 1: money could we can also use the money towards you
Speaker 1: can't use the money on anything. You can use the
Speaker 1: money towards sports leagues. You can use the money towards
Speaker 1: various kinds of educational things, like like like going to
Speaker 1: the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We can use the charter money
Speaker 1: for that. We can use it for books, we can
Speaker 1: use it for educational materials, sports things, et cetera. So
Speaker 1: it's been great, but it's super low tech. It's the
Speaker 1: rush to have more tech and education just seems so stupid,
Speaker 1: and of course the biggest California public school districts are
Speaker 1: blowing money on it left and right. When we return
Speaker 1: the bizarre story from a week or so ago about
Speaker 1: the death penalty being taken off the table then maybe
Speaker 1: put back on the table for some of the nine
Speaker 1: to eleven terrorists, I want to explain some of that
Speaker 1: from a legal perspective. Next on The John Girardi Show,
Speaker 1: the United States throughout the course of the War on Terror,
Speaker 1: was faced with some difficult questions about what to do
Speaker 1: with persons captured on the battlefield in the course of
Speaker 1: the War on Terror, because it was kind of these
Speaker 1: terrorist groups and these terrorists themselves were sort of this
Speaker 1: new category where we weren't exactly sure what to do
Speaker 1: with them. On the one hand, I mean, they're certainly
Speaker 1: not like an American criminal law defendant. We know exactly
Speaker 1: what to do with a criminal law defendant in America.
Speaker 1: If you're in the United States and you commit a murder,
Speaker 1: there's a process for how we deal with it. We
Speaker 1: have a whole criminal justice system set up for Okay,
Speaker 1: you get arrested, you have these are the sort of
Speaker 1: due process rights that you have as an American, and
Speaker 1: this is what we do with you. If you commit
Speaker 1: a crime here but you're not a citizen, their processes
Speaker 1: for deportation, whatever. There's so there's the criminal law process.
Speaker 1: But these terrorists that we're fighting, that maybe we capture
Speaker 1: on the battlefield in Afghanistan or Iraq, or that we
Speaker 1: pick up in Pakistan or whatever. So when we haven't
Speaker 1: killed these terrorists are not American criminal defendants, and are
Speaker 1: they entitled to the same due process protections that you know,
Speaker 1: if I if I as an American citizen here on
Speaker 1: you know, terra firma on US soil right here, if
Speaker 1: I allegedly commit a crime, I'm entitled to all kinds of
Speaker 1: due process protection them entitled to a lawyer, I'm entitled this,
Speaker 1: I'm titled that I've writ to a speedy trial. Blah
Speaker 1: blah blah. You have to have habeas corpus. There are
Speaker 1: all kinds of protections for me. But do we want
Speaker 1: to afford all of that to terrorists? Well, there is
Speaker 1: another way to kind of treat them, which is the
Speaker 1: laws surrounding the capture of enemy combatants during war. But
Speaker 1: the United States sort of realized, well that that doesn't
Speaker 1: even really apply. These are not like state actors, These
Speaker 1: are not uniformed military foes. Okay, And again this is
Speaker 1: we know what to do in the context of all right,
Speaker 1: it's the Battle of the Bulge, and you capture a
Speaker 1: group of Nazis and you put them in a pow camp,
Speaker 1: and then you have a process for how you're going
Speaker 1: to try them, and there's processes. Are you going to
Speaker 1: release them? Are you gonna try them for war crimes?
Speaker 1: What are you going to do. There's a process there.
Speaker 1: You understand what their do process rights are that they're
Speaker 1: all kinds of bodies, bodies of international law that sort
Speaker 1: of deal with how do you treat these people. The
Speaker 1: problem in the United States faced was we had this
Speaker 1: body of terrorists who were sort of in this murky
Speaker 1: middle for which there wasn't any real clear designation. Some
Speaker 1: of these guys were taken to were picked up by
Speaker 1: the CIA and taken to black sites in different places
Speaker 1: around the world, and a lot of them wound up
Speaker 1: in Guantanamo Bay. Why, well, Guantanamo Bay is this bizarre
Speaker 1: thing as far as geography and jurisdiction. It's totally under
Speaker 1: the control of the military. It's not under the control
Speaker 1: of any individual American state, and that sort of it
Speaker 1: sort of represents the America. The United States government basically saying, okay, well,
Speaker 1: we are not gonna let people in here come under
Speaker 1: the enforcement of any individual state or federal criminal law jurisdiction.
Speaker 1: We gotta hold these guys. But then there comes the
Speaker 1: question of, well, we're just gonna hold these guys indefinitely,
Speaker 1: But what is our plan with these people? You can't
Speaker 1: let them go. They're ruthless, dangerous terrorists. There's no foreign
Speaker 1: government to negotiate with for them, no foreign government that
Speaker 1: claims them as their soldier. Okay, again, this isn't a
Speaker 1: German soldier that we kidnap during the Battle of the Bulge,
Speaker 1: and we can negotiate with the German government or the
Speaker 1: success or German government whatever for his or her release.
Speaker 1: What do you do with this person? Are we just
Speaker 1: gonna indefinitely detain this person for the rest of his
Speaker 1: life or Also, here's the other question, do we execute him?
Speaker 1: The story in the New York Times, it's been not
Speaker 1: the New York Times, but that's been in the media
Speaker 1: has been dealing with what is the United States gonna
Speaker 1: do with colleague Sheikh Mohammed? The guy is one of
Speaker 1: the masterminds of the nine to eleven attack. Okay, so
Speaker 1: this guy murdered almost three thousand people on nine to eleven,
Speaker 1: he orchestrated it. Do we execute him? Do we give
Speaker 1: him the death penalty? Well, do we give him the
Speaker 1: death penalty without a trial? I mean that you kind
Speaker 1: of can't do that, right. There has to be some
Speaker 1: kind of judicial process before you just execute somebody. Even
Speaker 1: the idea of detaining this person for the rest of
Speaker 1: his or her life. Shouldn't that be done with some
Speaker 1: kind of process, like some kind of judicial process whereby
Speaker 1: we definitively convict this person of the crime of or
Speaker 1: the war crime or whatever of orchestrating the nine to
Speaker 1: eleven attacks. But what does that judicial process look like?
Speaker 1: How should it look? Should it? Again, we fully understand
Speaker 1: that colleague Sheik Muhammad maybe is not entitled to all
Speaker 1: the same due process protections of an American citizen accused of,
Speaker 1: you know, accused of a dui in Mobile Alabama. Okay,
Speaker 1: an American citizen accused of a dui and Mobile Alabama
Speaker 1: is entitled to have an attorney entitled to this protection,
Speaker 1: that protection, you know, being able to see the witnesses
Speaker 1: against it. There's this whole panoply of rights, some in
Speaker 1: the Constitution itself that protect the Fifth Amendment rights, sixth Amoris,
Speaker 1: all this stuff that protects an American criminal law defendant.
Speaker 1: Do we apply all that to some terrorists? Who again
Speaker 1: is we don't give all of those due process rights
Speaker 1: to prisoners of war. We have certain standards we have
Speaker 1: to obey with prisoners of war, So we have to
Speaker 1: have some so how does this all work? So basically,
Speaker 1: the United States developed some kind of system of a
Speaker 1: military trial, some kind of military tribunal trial system apply
Speaker 1: which they are applying to actors like this. Now here's
Speaker 1: the problem is that in this system, these guys were
Speaker 1: given defense attorneys, and these defense attorneys did bring up
Speaker 1: or made the allegation anyway that some of these guys
Speaker 1: were subjected to enhanced interrogation methods. And what's been happening
Speaker 1: for a long time has been some kind of plea deal.
Speaker 1: There's been the examination of a plea deal because these
Speaker 1: guys have been these guys have been held in Guantanamo
Speaker 1: Bay for like twenty years now, and this process has
Speaker 1: been one long procedural kicking of cans down the road
Speaker 1: over the course of that time of trying to a
Speaker 1: figure out what the heck we were gonna even do
Speaker 1: with these guys to begin with, and then the trial
Speaker 1: process taking a long time, a lot of it having
Speaker 1: a lot of influence based on who was in power. Now,
Speaker 1: it came out about a week ago that the two
Speaker 1: sides in this adjudication had reached a plea deal whereby
Speaker 1: Khalid Sheik Muhammad would not get the death penalty, but
Speaker 1: would get a life sentence in Guantanamo. Now in Guantanamo
Speaker 1: this is one of the absurd things about Guantanamo Bay.
Speaker 1: Barack Obama came into office pledging he would shut down
Speaker 1: Guantanamo Bay, and this was in an anti Bush posture,
Speaker 1: trying to characterize Guantanamo Bay as this massive human rights violation.
Speaker 1: Then Obama gets into office, actually sees all the classified
Speaker 1: stuff he wasn't seeing when he was candidate Obama and
Speaker 1: realizes he can't shut down Guantanamo Bay, that the guys
Speaker 1: in Guantanamo Bay are so frickin' dangerous, and there's basically
Speaker 1: no other place to put these guys where that anywhere
Speaker 1: else you put them is under some other country or
Speaker 1: American States jurisdiction. So he kind of asked to keep
Speaker 1: him in Guantanamo Bay. Plus the guys incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay,
Speaker 1: like college chick Muhammad. That was one of the conditions
Speaker 1: of this proposed plea deal was I'll take the plea
Speaker 1: deal to not have to not be executed. I'll accept
Speaker 1: life in prison, but you need to keep me here
Speaker 1: on Guantanamo Bay because the conditions there are actually pretty decent.
Speaker 1: At this point, they're pretty decent. Now the BS nature
Speaker 1: of this story. This is how the story went. It
Speaker 1: was announced about a week or two ago that in
Speaker 1: this military court process, colleague Shaik Mohammad has reached a
Speaker 1: plea deal with government prosecutors to he's gonna plead guilty.
Speaker 1: They take the death penalty off the table, but it'll
Speaker 1: serve the rest of his life in Guantanamo Bay. So
Speaker 1: the Barack Obama ideal of closing down Guantanamo Bay, which
Speaker 1: it's clear kind of Biden was maybe also sort of
Speaker 1: hoping to do because Biden wants to be the president
Speaker 1: who ended the war on tear that that ain't happening
Speaker 1: because we got to keep Kaleigu shake Mohammad there. So
Speaker 1: it's announced that this plea deal happens, Republicans attack the
Speaker 1: Biden administration Biden Harris and say what, you took the
Speaker 1: death penalty off the table for the guy who orchestrated
Speaker 1: nine to eleven and killed three thousand people. All these
Speaker 1: damaging attack ads against you know, all these damaging accusations
Speaker 1: against Biden Harris. Biden is the executive, so he one
Speaker 1: hundred percent can oversee and direct what goes on with
Speaker 1: this prosecution of these terrorists. Okay, Biden one hundred percent
Speaker 1: has controlled There's no such thing as federal criminal law
Speaker 1: enforcement that's independent of the president, So it's the president
Speaker 1: can do this via the Secretary of Defense. So that
Speaker 1: story broke like two weeks ago of a plea deal.
Speaker 1: A week later, the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, comes
Speaker 1: out and says, oh, the prosecutors agree to this without
Speaker 1: consulting me first, and I rescind this plea deal. Yeah right,
Speaker 1: all right, So let me get this straight. You mean
Speaker 1: to tell me that this bizarre military tribunal set up,
Speaker 1: which is directly under the military, under the Secretary of Defense,
Speaker 1: to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the guy who orchestrated the greatest,
Speaker 1: the single, biggest, worst terrorist attack in world history, who
Speaker 1: is in Guantanamo Bay, maybe the most the highest profile
Speaker 1: terrorists still alive, responsible for the death of three thousand
Speaker 1: New Yorkers and the people who died in Pennsylvania and
Speaker 1: the people who died at the Pentagon. You mean to
Speaker 1: tell me, oh, that Lloyd Austin didn't know about this
Speaker 1: plea deal. No, he knew they were letting families of
Speaker 1: nine to eleven victims know that this plea deal was coming.
Speaker 1: President Biden knew if they, even if they hadn't seen
Speaker 1: the exact document, they knew this was coming. And by
Speaker 1: the way, I'm not even that big of a fan
Speaker 1: of the death penalty, but this is a cya for
Speaker 1: the politics of the presidential election. When we return the
Speaker 1: vibes election next on the John Girardi Show. A more
Speaker 1: and more commonplace bit of gen Z slang that I
Speaker 1: keep hearing as a old fart millennial is the word vibes.
Speaker 1: It's not that you actually know that something is a
Speaker 1: certain way, but it gives off that vibe vibes. Oh,
Speaker 1: my gosh, this is so vibes, the vibes of this,
Speaker 1: vibes of that. The more I think about the Tim
Speaker 1: Walls selection as VP, and actually so much of American politics,
Speaker 1: he's being portrayed as moderate, nothing about him is moderate.
Speaker 1: This whole panoply of policy positions he's taken. He's very
Speaker 1: aggressively left wing. But because he's a fat, old white
Speaker 1: guy who wears a suit from the Midwest, he just
Speaker 1: kind of gives off the vibe that he must be
Speaker 1: more moderate, so therefore he is. It's like how Nancy
Speaker 1: Mace gives the vibe of being an extreme right winger
Speaker 1: when actually she's much more liberal than I am. It's idiotic.
Speaker 1: That'll do it for John Girardi Show. See you next
Speaker 1: time on Power Talk.