All right, joining us now is New York Times best-selling author Charles Goiet.

His book is Empire of Lies, Fragments from the Memory Hole.

And he's had a lot of experience with the military with weapons systems.

We're going to talk to him a little bit about his experience with the Strategic Defense Initiative that Reagan had and kind of get his take on what's happening with this anti-ballistic missile thing as well as where are we going now? Where are we right now in this war? Thank you so much for joining us, Charles. So it's a great pleasure to be with you, David. Thank you very much for having me. Well, thank you. You know, we don't really know we're getting all these contradictory statements every day talking about an empire of lies. Is it nearly over? Are we just beginning? We get different stories even from the same people in the Trump regime. So exactly where are we? Well, he's got the fog of war, don't we? And I guess it's mainly

because we're getting a lot of smoke blown at us by the government on both sides of the war.

Tell us what you see in terms of what you're watching. First of all, we're not at war.

Yeah. But then don't forget that we've been at war for 47 years. That's right.

It's a total confusion. The fog of war, I guess, that's That's right. It's a total confusion.

The fog of war, I guess.

That's not good enough.

It's political fog.

You know, just to get off track for one second, there's a great deal to be said for the virtues of the founding fathers who knew the historical precedence for these kinds of events and they decided that on good

precedent they decided that the American people should have the power to declare war

through their elected representatives and it was because first of all I mean two

primary reasons first of all of course they knew the precedents did suggest

that executives kings and so on,

popes even, had a propensity to engage in needless wars. That's right. And that if you launch the

power with the people who had to pay for them and die in them, then there was a certain amount of

reluctance that didn't appear in the executive branch. So they moved the war-making authority

without ambiguity over to the people.

But it had the second advantage of having the debate about the objectives of the war clarified in a declaration of war.

So you know that in signing the Declaration of Independence, the founders pledged their lives,

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