05/08/14 – Justin and Jessica Pavoni – The Scott Horton Show

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Our next guests are Justin and Jessica Pavone.
If I can read my own handwriting right.
Pavone, right.
And they are of the U.S. Air Force.
Welcome to the show.
How are y'all doing?
Hi, we're doing well.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate y'all joining us on the show today.
And I guess I could have worked out the logistics a little bit better first.
But that's all right.
We can trade off the phone back and forth.
You guys decide which questions, who wants to answer, and all that.
But nice to meet you.
And I guess, first of all, can you go ahead and introduce yourselves and tell us, you know, name, rank, serial number, where you're from, and what are you doing there, and all of that.
And then we'll get into the good stuff.
Sounds like somebody's been through SEER training.
But my name's Jessica Pavone.
I'm a captain in the Air Force, Air Force Academy grad in 2006.
And was an AFSOC pilot for about four and a half years.
And just got qualified as a C-130 pilot a couple years ago.
And a conscientious objector.
I'll pass you off to my husband.
Yep.
Air Force Academy graduate.
And we were 2006 together.
My wife and I started J-10 pilot training.
I got married in 2008.
And since then, between the two of us, we've been on ten deployments.
Jess has been five times to Afghanistan, twice to the Horn of Africa, and once to Southeast Asia.
And I've spent a couple of tours in Afghanistan.
I'm a Strike Eagle pilot formerly.
And we both recently put in a conscientious objection package in the last year or so.
So we're just waiting to hear back from the Air Force at this time.
All right.
Well, and so I guess the obvious question is, at what point during your tours over there did you decide, and did you decide together, and how did it come about that you realized that you wanted out of this job bad enough?
And if you're not willing to wait until your time's up.
Yeah, so it wasn't really any one particular point.
I'd say it was a sequence of kind of big life-changing, you know, opinion-changing moments.
So we definitely were really influenced by some of the, I guess you'd call it libertarian philosophy with the non-aggression principles.
But moreover, you know, a lot of things didn't really add up for us over in Afghanistan.
A lot of, I guess you could say, things that you expect your country to do with regards to following the Constitution and, you know, basic rule of law stuff that turns out not really to work the way, you know, maybe you thought it did when you first signed up.
In terms of occupation, how do you mean?
Well, you know, for me, you know, we can talk a little bit more specifics, but, you know, the first really big clue in that Jeff and I had, and we were both, Jeff was working with what's called Special Ops Command, and I was a liaison for Special Ops Command for fighters.
And, you know, when you start seeing that American citizens are getting put on, you know, lists to be bombed, you know, even for non-libertarians out there, that doesn't, you know, that's blatantly unconstitutional.
I mean, I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but if you go ahead and read the document, you know, Article 3, Section 3, it's pretty black and white and says you can't do that.
I mean, I don't care how bad the guy is, you know, they have to have a trial.
So, you know, we saw some stuff like that, and we were like, wow, if that's the threshold for American citizens, you know, what's the difference between the average American and, you know, a foreigner?
I mean, they're all human, they're no less human, and they have no less right to due process.
And so, you know, that was probably the big thing that kicked us off and think in a different way.
And then, so, oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.
You know, the one thing I was going to add, too, is when you realize how people are targeted, that kind of changes things for you as well.
You know, I'd be the first to defend my family or my home or my country.
That's why I signed up, you know, as a senior during 9-11 in high school, and that's why I joined the military.
When you go and what you see is not actually defensive in nature, you kind of need to call into question what the motives are when you recognize that, you know, the people that are being killed, whose property is being destroyed, in all likelihood had nothing to do with 9-11, you need to search for some sort of purpose.
And uncertainty had nothing to do with 9-11, right?
Yes, yes, you're absolutely right.
I mean, I remember reading only something like 92% of Afghans had never even heard of such a thing.
And you've got to imagine the pollsters probably never really left Kabul in the first place, you know?
Never mind out in the countryside.
It's funny, I think a lot of the, you know, regular Afghan citizens, you know, a lot of them still think they're fighting the Soviets over there.
And if you actually go and see what some of these villagers look like, you know, you're talking about an 80-year-old guy with a head of beard, and, you know, he's walking around the mountains on these mud trails herding his sheep around.
I mean, these, you know, not that there aren't some bad dudes hiding in the hills, but, like, the average person in that country has nothing to do, you know, and wants nothing to do with terrorism.
Well, and, yeah, I think you're implying they're no less safe from bombs than some militant hiding out nearby, either.
Yes, absolutely.
You know, going around the world, too, you know, for me, Scott, the journey really kind of began with a little bit of cynicism and disillusion, maybe a philosophical opposition when you see how ineffective the strategies are.
I think you can ask many military members now, and they'd say, yes, you know, what we're doing is unnecessary or it's counterproductive.
You know, there's a generation of people around the world whose experience with Americans is, you know, the people who chopper in at 2 a.m., kick down your door, you know, shoot the dog and take your dad.
For a long time, I was stuck on, hey, this is counterproductive, what are we doing?
Within the last year or so, it kind of became a moral issue when I learned of non-aggression.
That kind of gave me a frame through which to view our actions overseas.
And how did you pick up on that?
Oh, boy.
Rothbard?
Murray Rothbard, perhaps, the Four New Liberty.
But Ron Paul's 2012 campaign was really instrumental in kind of opening our eyes when you hear somebody whose words are jiving with what you've experienced.
You tend to listen.
Right.
Well, of course, I've always been Ron Paul's number one fan for exactly that reason, that he makes the anti-war position.
We're four years left on our contracts.
So that's one of the reasons, you know, they're probably taking a hard look as well.
And, you know, what does it say when your officer leadership starts to think this way?
All right, now, I think y'all mentioned earlier, or somehow I picked up on the idea that you guys, or one or both of y'all, are part of the Joint Special Operations Command, the highest tier of special forces.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Justin and Jessica Pavone.
They're a married couple and both Air Force officers, pilots, and they're now individualist libertarians suing for conscientious objector status.
What did your commanding officers tell you guys when you said we refuse to participate any longer in this?
Yeah, so I guess you could say they were a little bit surprised about that.
It's not something that you generally talk about with your chain of command until you're absolutely sure that you want to go that direction.
But to be fair, once we both informed our chains, they were supportive, pushed us in the direction that we needed to go with regards to the reg, and they kind of separate you from your former client.
What they were supposed to do as far as funneling you guys through the system correctly, the same thing for the chaplains and the psychiatrists, or did they try to work real hard on you and talk you out of it or see if they could find a way to dishonorably discharge you or any kind of thing like that?
Well, we're kind of still waiting to see how the whole thing plays out, to be honest with you.
It's not easy because you'd like to just be beaten and move on with your life, but you have to continue to stay in kind of out of prudence just because otherwise that's a big threat.
I highly recommend looking up guys like Doug Casey, Rick Ruhl, reading Rothbard's books and all that stuff.
So I'd say that will be a really big eye-opener to people with regards to how the money works.
But from personal experience, I was a fighter pilot and certainly went in with nothing but the best of intentions.
We both signed up after 9-11 in response to, holy crap, our country just got attacked in this terrible event.
Foreign fighters were killed.
But the moral of the story, I would say, is that the whole thing was absolutely pointless.
It's unknown how many innocent people lost their lives as a consequence, but why are we there?
What is the purpose of having an infinite number of these little outposts in the middle of nowhere?
Frankly, it's just absolutely purposeless.
That's from my own experience.
If I could take back being a part of it, it's kind of a hard one to say you'd take back because from a tactical perspective, when a bunch of American dudes on the ground get attacked, you want to defend them.
But from a strategic perspective, you're like, why the hell are they on the ground in the first place?
You know what I mean?
Yeah, kind of two different questions.
And of course, that's how they do it, right?
They make the whole thing about the sodastraw view, fighting for Johnny, no matter what, your blood brother out there, rather than any kind of even tactical question.
About 300 combat hours above that valley.
You couldn't say it more accurately, man.
I'm sorry about that.
It's horrible.
It's like it's on autopilot, right?
There's your metaphor from your career, though.
If I can maybe say one more thing.
I guess the biggest takeaway for me as the average citizen is, there's a really specific reason why they label this thing the war on terror.
We have a great opportunity for a short period of time to get some real rollback of the National Surveillance State.
Now, they're already trying to tire us by introducing fake reforms in the Congress.
And the courts, they betrayed their sworn oaths to the Constitution and Bill of Rights again and again, and can in no way be trusted to stop the abuses for us.
We've got to do it ourselves.
How?
We nullify it at the state level.
It's still not easy.
The off now project of the 10th Amendment Center has gotten off to a great start.
I mean it.
There's real reason to be optimistic here.
They've gotten their model legislation introduced all over the place.
Sign up today.
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$15 per year to read it online.
That's the future of freedom at fff.org slash subscribe.
Peace and freedom.
Thank you.
Hey, y'all.
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