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Intel Analysts: US Fixing Facts Around Policy

Monday September 28, 2015

More than 50 intelligence officers from the Defense Intelligence Agency have formally complained that their work is being altered before it is sent to senior Obama Administration officials -- and even to the president himself. Concerns over the effectiveness of the year-long new US war in Iraq and Syria are being covered up and a more rosy picture is being painted. The media has largely ignored this replay of the kind of lies fed the run-up to the 2002 Iraq war and, as could be expected, Congress is totally uninterested. Today's Liberty Report is not uninterested, however....
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Congress and the Fed Refuse to Learn From Their Mistakes

Sunday September 27, 2015

This month marks the seventh anniversary of the bursting of the housing bubble and the subsequent economic meltdown. The mood in Congress following the meltdown resembled the panicked atmosphere that followed the September 11th attacks. As was the case after September 11th, Congress rushed to pass hastily written legislation that, instead of dealing with the real causes of the crisis, simply gave the government more power.

Just as few understood the role our interventionist foreign policy played in the September 11th attacks, few in Congress understood that the 2008 meltdown was caused by the Federal Reserve and Congress, not by unregulated capitalism. Not surprising to anyone familiar with economic history, the story of the 2008 meltdown starts with the bursting of the Fed-created tech bubble.
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Catalonia Vote - Will They Secede?

Saturday September 26, 2015

Voters in Spain's Catalonia region will go to the polls on Sunday to elect a new parliament. Parties favoring secession from the Spanish state appear poised to make significant gains or even end up in majority. EU officialdom is furious at the move, and both German and British leaders have openly condemned any secessionist impulse among Catalans. Why so much fear over self-determination, which is after all a basic human right? What does it mean if an individual or even a group cannot determine for itself with whom or what it prefers to associate? Today's special edition of the Ron Paul Liberty Report takes a look at tomorrow's vote with an eye on real human rights...
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The Harsh Lessons of History: Faux Reports of Progress Against IS

Friday September 25, 2015

Allegations that American military analysts may have “cooked the books” to skew intelligence assessments about the campaign against Islamic State (IS), providing a more optimistic account of progress, are a sign of bad things to come.

Bad intel leads to bad decisions. Bad intel created purposefully suggests a war that is being lost, with the people in charge that loathe to admit it even as they continue to stumble forward, ever-more blind. And if that sounds like America’s previous war in Iraq, or its earlier one in Vietnam, you are not wrong.

A Pentagon Inspector General’s investigation into allegations of overly optimistic intelligence reporting, first reported in the New York Times, began after at least one Defence Intelligence Agency analyst claimed officials overseeing the war against Islamic State were improperly reworking the assessments prepared for senior policy makers. The focus is on whether military officials changed the conclusions of draft intelligence assessments during a review process and then passed them on.
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Saving Syria

Friday September 25, 2015

Are the Russians coming to Syria to save the day? After more than a year of US bombing, ISIS seems to not have suffered much. Meanwhile the US maintains that it officially still demands regime change in Syria, even as US Secretary of State John Kerry hinted last week that it might accept Assad in power as part of a transitional government. In Washington's corridors of foreign policy power, the neocons and left-interventionist political appointees are in full battle with more seasoned diplomats. The Obama Administration seems at war with itself. RPI Director Daniel McAdams joins RT's Crosstalk to discuss latest developments in Syria...
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Good News: Gallup Finds Half of US Fears Government

Thursday September 24, 2015

What is the greatest threat to the American people? In a new poll taken by the Gallup organization we learn that half the country sees its own government as most threatening to life and liberty. Another poll taken last year showed strong libertarian leanings among the young people of this country. Might this signal a turning point for the warfare-welfare state? Today's Liberty Report takes a look at the trends...
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The Rape of Afghanistan

Wednesday September 23, 2015

The rape of young boys in Afghanistan by our “allies” is getting a lot of press attention these days, provoked by the revelation that US military personnel who tried to stop it are being disciplined for interfering. Two US officers apparently beat up one of our pet warlords, who insisted on keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave: this kind of rough justice got one relieved of his command and the other is being forced to retire.

The US military denies ordering its personnel to look the other way, but this is a lie: why else would they be discharging one of the Special Forces soldiers who beat up that Afghan commander? If he didn’t disobey orders to ignore the practice then on what grounds are they forcing him out?

Writing in National Review, Mark Krikorian fulminates:

“While punishing our soldiers for roughing up pedophile rapists is outrageous, the general policy that “allegations of child sexual abuse by Afghan military or police personnel would be a matter of domestic Afghan criminal law” (in the words of an Army spokesman) is unavoidable given our policy of semi-colonization. If it were up to me, we’d wash our hands of Afghanistan, making clear that if the Taliban (or whichever armed gang manages to take power) makes the mistake of again serving as a safe haven and training ground for people planning to attack the United States, we’ll come back and kill a bunch of them again. But that until that day, and that day may never come, they’re on their own and are free to go on raping their children, if that’s what their primitive and barbarous culture calls for.”

Krikorian goes on to pose another alternative: go all out and “simply colonize the place.” While he acknowledges this isn’t going to happen – after all, “that’s never worked out well in Afghanistan” – “it would have the advantage of allowing us to impose our (objectively superior) standards on them.”
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Iran's Parchin Nuclear Myth Begins to Unravel

Wednesday September 23, 2015

For well over three years, heavy doses of propaganda have created a myth about a purported steel cylinder for testing explosives located on a site at Iran’s Parchin military testing reservation. Iran was refusing to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect the site while it sought to hide its past nuclear weapons-related work, according to that storyline.

Now Iran has agreed to allow the IAEA to visit the site at Parchin and environmental samples have already been collected at the site. However, the politically charged tale of the bomb test chamber of Parchin is beginning to unravel. IAEA director general Yukiya Amano entered the building in which the explosives chamber had supposedly been located on Monday and announced afterward that he found “no equipment” in the building.

That is surely a major story, in light of how much has been made of the alleged presence of the chamber at that location. But you may have missed that news, unless you happened to read the story by Jonathan Tirone of Bloomberg Business News, who was the only journalist for a significant news outlet who chose to lead with the story in his coverage of Amano’s Monday visit.

The rest of the news media buried that fact far down in their stories, focusing almost entirely on the fact that the Iranians have been allowed to physically gather environmental samples at the site under the gaze of IAEA technicians rather than IAEA inspectors carrying out that function.
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Foreign Policy by Intimidation: GOP Candidates Show How It's Done

Tuesday September 22, 2015

The media are anointing former Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina as the winner of last Wednesday’s second Republican presidential-aspirant debate. They are saying that she was the best prepared and most convincing speaker, and, indeed, maybe she was. But what is being largely ignored is the actual content of the so-called debate, which was supposed to be focused on foreign policy. Presuming that all the potential candidates had been assiduously primed on the major issues by their advisers, what might have been informed opinion was instead pathetically ignorant and, more than that, dangerous.

Note for example what Fiorina had to say about her policy towards Russia: “Having met Vladimir Putin, I wouldn’t talk to him at all. We’ve talked way too much to him. What I would do, immediately, is begin rebuilding the Sixth Fleet, I would begin rebuilding the missile defense program in Poland. I would conduct regular, aggressive military exercises in the Baltic States. I’d probably send a few thousand more troops into Germany. Vladimir Putin would get the message.”
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Putin’s Consistency on Syria has Washington Fuming

Sunday September 20, 2015

It is increasingly difficult to watch the most recent coverage of the Syrian war and not be struck by how utterly illogical and convoluted it has become. But look through the media spin and it’s clear: the Russian leader's steady moves in Syria are perplexing the US.

Whether it's the latest neocon claim that the way to "help" refugees is to drop more bombs and train more Al-Qaeda-linked rebels, or the conveniently-timed mass hysteria over Russia's (never secret) support for Bashar Assad — or even the strange (and completely false) notion floating around that the West has 'done nothing' in Syria, all of this nonsense is becoming very difficult to take seriously.

It’s fairly easy to tell when Washington is scrambling to keep control of a story, because two things usually happen: firstly, the media coverage becomes muddled and frazzled, and secondly, the White House quickly looks for somewhere to offload the blame. These days the scapegoat is usually Russia, and hey, why fix what ain’t broken?
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