Horrible events like yesterday's attack in New York capture our attention. The mainstream media focuses non-stop on every imaginable aspect of such events. Unfortunately there is little attention to tragedies of a far greater magnitude in places like Yemen which are largely due to our interventionist foreign policy. The US government has partnered with Saudi Arabia to completely flatten Yemen, with thousands of innocents killed in the process. We should pay attention to tragedies at home, but also tragedies overseas that are being perpetrated by Washington in our name. More in today's Liberty Report... read on...
This is how the Deep State crushes disobedience by the unwashed American public. It indicts not only ham sandwiches but, apparently, political infants in diapers too, if that's what it takes. Hence the sudden notoriety of Baby George Papadopoulos, who pled guilty to "lying" about an essentially immaterial date to the FBI.
Oh, and by all signs and signals that plea came after this 30 year-old novice had been wearing a wire for several months.
So here's how this noxious act of bullying by Robert Mueller's Federally-deputized thugs came down. It seems that during the early months of 2016, when Trump was winning primary after primary against all mainstream media expectations, the Donald's establishment betters began attacking his foreign policy credentials with special malice aforethought.
That was mainly owing to his sensible suggestion that it would be better to seek rapprochement with Russia rather than pursue Hillary's Cold War 2.0 and that 25 years after the disappearance of the Soviet Union from the pages of history that NATO was obsolete.
Since this totally plausible (and correct) viewpoint was deeply offensive to the Imperial City's group think and threatened the Warfare State's existential need for a fearsome enemy, Trump's ruminations about making a deal with Putin were belittled. They were, in fact, attributed not to a fresh look at the realities abroad or the possibility that homeland security does not require a global empire, but to the candidate's lack of any pedigreed foreign policy advisors. read on...
Wars that the United States is waging around the world undermine our security by turning entire populations against us and diverting our attention and resources away from urgent needs at home. No, the opposite is true: the United States faces serious threats, and can only protect itself by confronting them wherever they emerge. This debate has divided Americans for more than a century. Congress may soon have a rare opportunity to take one side or the other.
The battleground is Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East. For nearly three years, Yemen has been under relentless attack from the region’s richest country, Saudi Arabia. Saudi bombing has created what the United Nations calls “the largest humanitarian crisis in the world.” More than half the population is hungry. Cholera is raging and may afflict 1 million people by the end of this year. A child dies from preventable causes every ten minutes. Saudi forces have blockaded Yemen’s main port, so almost no humanitarian aid can reach the victims.
This war could not proceed without American help. Missiles and bombs raining down on Yemen are made in the United States. American intelligence officers help Saudi pilots pick targets to attack. Most important, American tanker planes refuel Saudi fighter jets in flight, allowing them to carry out many more raids than they could if they had to return regularly to their bases. At the UN, American diplomats work to water down condemnations of Saudi Arabia, and to block investigation of possible war crimes. read on...
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) challenged the Defense Secretary and Secretary of State yesterday, asserting that no one of intellectual honesty would believe that the 9/11 war authorization had anything to do with ISIS or Niger. He has a good point. But the White House does not want its war wings clipped and insists that things are fine as they are. We are militarily active in some 19 countries now. Does the 9/11 resolution really encompass all of these wars? Tune in to today's Liberty Report... read on...
Turkey's decision to purchase a Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile system has raised more than eyebrows at NATO headquarters. Top brass in Brussels has warned Turkey that its system would not be interoperable with NATO's US-made system. Is Turkey turning away from its Western alliance? Hedging its bets? What do Syria and the Kurds have to do with the decision? Tune in to today's Liberty Report... read on...
If you want to change a group of terrorists who have killed American overseas into something that appears to be much more benign, all you have to do is pay off the right people in Washington. With enough money, you can even open a nice plush lobbying office on Pennsylvania Avenue in the District of Columbia, not too far from the White House and Capitol Hill.
One-time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been rightly blamed for the ill-conceived and badly bungled “regime change” in Libya in 2011 that eventually led to her mishandling of the resulting blowback in Benghazi, but one of her greatest failings just might have involved the piece of paper she signed when she removed the Mujaheddin e Khalq (MEK) group from the State Department list of “designated terrorist organizations” in September 2012.
How is it possible that the bad judgment demonstrated in the Libyan fiasco that created a failed state, a humanitarian disaster, a migrant crisis, armed terrorists, and ultimately produced the murder of the US ambassador and three other Americans compare with a signature on a piece of paper? It is because that signature put in place one of the elements that will most likely in the near future lead to a far more disastrous war for the United States than was Libya. MEK, now labeled the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), has become a principal voice of the war party that is now seeking to attack Iran, a role similar to that played by Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress in his disseminating of lies in the lead up to the catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The tale of the rehabilitation and rise of MEK/NCRI is a subset of the ongoing corruption of America’s political culture, best illustrated by the fact that even national security is now up for sale, enabling a terrorist group to transform itself into a “resistance movement” and eventually be labeled “freedom fighters.” read on...
Does anyone in the Trump Administration have a clue about our Syria policy? In March, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson appeared to be finally pulling back from President Obama’s disastrous “Assad must go” position that has done nothing but prolong the misery in Syria. At the time, Tillerson said, the "longer-term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people." read on...
A television interview of a top Qatari official confessing the truth behind the origins of the war in Syria is going viral across Arabic social media during the same week a leaked top secret NSA document was published which confirms that the armed opposition in Syria was under the direct command of foreign governments from the early years of the conflict.
And according to a well-known Syria analyst and economic adviser with close contacts in the Syrian government, the explosive interview constitutes a high level "public admission to collusion and coordination between four countries to destabilize an independent state, [including] possible support for Nusra/al-Qaeda." Importantly, "this admission will help build case for what Damascus sees as an attack on its security & sovereignty. It will form basis for compensation claims."
A 2013 London press conference: Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al Thani with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. A2014 Hillary Clinton email confirmed Qatar as a state-sponsor of ISIS during that same time period.
As the war in Syria continues slowly winding down, it seems new source material comes out on an almost a weekly basis in the form of testimonials of top officials involved in destabilizing Syria, and even occasional leaked emails and documents which further detail covert regime change operations against the Assad government. Though much of this content serves to confirm what has already long been known by those who have never accepted the simplistic propaganda which has dominated mainstream media, details continue to fall in place, providing future historians with a clearer picture of the true nature of the war. read on...
Donald Trump’s presidency, like preceding ones, is trapped by the interests of the power elite that has ruled America since World War II. The constraints imposed on domestic policy by this elite inevitably have a direct impact on America’s foreign policy. Alternative social forces, like the ones behind Trump’s presidential triumph, only have a limited impact on domestic and ultimately on foreign policy. A conceptual detour and a brief on history and on Trump’s domestic setting when he was elected will help clarifying these theses. read on...
In the past, America has witnessed “McCarthyism” from the Right and even complaints from the Right about “McCarthyism of the Left.” But what we are witnessing now amid the Russia-gate frenzy is what might be called “Establishment McCarthyism,” traditional media/political powers demonizing and silencing dissent that questions mainstream narratives.
This extraordinary assault on civil liberties is cloaked in fright-filled stories about “Russian propaganda” and wildly exaggerated tales of the Kremlin’s “hordes of Twitter bots,” but its underlying goal is to enforce Washington’s “groupthinks” by creating a permanent system that shuts down or marginalizes dissident opinions and labels contrary information – no matter how reasonable and well-researched – as “disputed” or “rated false” by mainstream “fact-checking” organizations like PolitiFact.
It doesn’t seem to matter that the paragons of this new structure – such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and, indeed, PolitiFact – have a checkered record of getting facts straight.
For instance, PolitiFact still rates as “true” Hillary Clinton’s false claim that “all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies” agreed that Russia was behind the release of Democratic emails last year. Even the Times and The Associated Press belatedly ran corrections after President Obama’s intelligence chiefs admitted that the assessment came from what Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called “hand-picked” analysts from only three agencies: CIA, FBI and NSA. read on...
