The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
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Time to End Our 14 Year Middle East Misadventure

Wednesday July 5, 2017

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The United States invaded Iraq in March, 2003. Over the ensuing fourteen years we’ve done nothing of significance that hasn’t proven counterproductive.

None of this should have been a surprise. Prior to invading Iraq, Lieutenant General Bill Odom, the Director of the National Security Agency under President Reagan made it clear in every forum that would carry his opinion that if America invaded Iraq it would be the greatest strategic blunder in the nation’s history. Those of us with any knowledge of the region shared his opinion. Unhappily, the nation’s elected leadership ignored the fact that the Sunni-Shia religious conflict over Mohammed’s succession has defined the entire region since it began in 632AD and blundered into a religious war we couldn't win.

The dream of a Shia Crescent, with Shias controlling Iran, Iraq and Syria was, as long as Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, impossible to realize. Our invasion of Iraq, and the elections which the majority Shias dominated, made the Shia Crescent a reality. Iraq’s leading Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Sistani, made it clear he would insist every vote counted and made sure his Shia majority got to the polls. While Al-Qaeda and ISIS, supported by their Sunni brethren in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States, along with the Kurds are contesting this reality, our absence of any Grand Strategy in the region and hostility to the Shias has given the Russians a strategic opening which can’t be reversed. 
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Declaring Independence - A Novel Idea!

Tuesday July 4, 2017

Thomas Jefferson got so many things correct in his draft of the Declaration of Independence. From the opening to the conclusion, the blueprint for a free and prosperous confederation of independent states was laid out. Many things have gone wrong since then...but in many areas we have made progress! In today's Liberty Report, Ron Paul breaks down where we are some 241 years after that fateful day...
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The Fraud of the White Helmets

Tuesday July 4, 2017

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I actually forced myself to watch the documentary The White Helmets, which is available on Netflix. It is 40 minutes long, is of high quality cinematographically speaking, and tells a very convincing tale that was promoted as “the story of real-life heroes and impossible hope.” It is overall a very impressive piece of propaganda, so much so that it has won numerous awards including the Oscar for Best Documentary Short this year and the White Helmets themselves were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. More to the point, however, is the undeniable fact that the documentary has helped shape the public understanding of what is going on in Syria, delivering a Manichean tale that depicts the “rebels” as always good and Bashar al-Assad and his government as un-redeemably evil.

It has been reliably reported that celebrities like George Clooney, Justin Timberlake and Hillary Clinton really like the White Helmets documentary and have promoted it with the understanding that it represents the truth about Syria, but it is, of course, not the whole story. The film, which was made by the White Helmets themselves without any external verification of what it depicts, portrays the group as “heroic,” an “impartial, life-saving rescue organization” of first responders.

Excluded from the scenes of heroism under fire is the White Helmets’ relationship with the al-Qaeda affiliated group Jabhat al-Nusra and its participation in the torture and execution of “rebel” opponents. Indeed, the White Helmets only operate in rebel held territory, which enables them to shape the narrative both regarding who they are and what is occurring on the ground. Because of increasing awareness of the back story, there is now a growing movement to petition the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to revoke the Oscar based on the complete and deliberate misrepresentation of what the White Helmets are all about.
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Trump Appoints Himself Chicago Police Chief

Monday July 3, 2017

Will 40 more armed federal agents working in Chicago be able to stop the bloodbath in the streets? That is what President Trump has sent in, calling it an anti-gun violence "strike force." We're not sure more police and more agents are the solution. Maybe there is another way...
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You Want a Picture of the Future? Imagine a Boot Stamping on Your Face

Monday July 3, 2017

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We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by such science fiction writers as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.

Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move.

Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.”

Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”
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We Must Declare Independence

Monday July 3, 2017

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As Independence Day comes around again we should spend a few moments between barbecue and fireworks to think about the meaning of independence. The colonists who rebelled against the British Crown were, among other things, unhappy about taxation. Yet, as economist Gary North points out, the total burden of British imperial taxation was about one-to-two percent of national income.
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How Accidental are America’s Accidental Civilian Killings Across the Middle East?

Saturday July 1, 2017

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US Secretary of Defense James Mattis has said“civilian casualties are a fact of life in this sort of situation,” referring to America’s war against Islamic State.

How can America in clear conscience continue to kill civilians across the Middle East? It’s easy; ask Grandpa what he did in the Good War. Civilian deaths in WWII weren’t dressed up as collateral damage, they were policy.
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'The Putin Interviews' - Oliver Stone Speaks Out!

Friday June 30, 2017

What makes legendary film-maker Oliver Stone tick? How is he able to reach millions with such powerful messages? What motivated him to make his most recent and very controversial "The Putin Interviews," which is driving the neocons and Washington elites crazy? Today's Liberty Report catches up with Stone from his Paris hotel room for a very lively and spirited conversation. You will not see this kind of interview on the mainstream media, which has been in "attack" mode since the film came out. Watch it here -- and don't miss Stone's surprise ending!
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NYT Finally Retracts Russia-gate Canard

Friday June 30, 2017

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The New York Times has finally admitted that one of the favorite Russia-gate canards – that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies concurred on the assessment of Russian hacking of Democratic emails – is false.

On Thursday, the Times appended a correction to a June 25 article that had repeated the false claim, which has been used by Democrats and the mainstream media for months to brush aside any doubts about the foundation of the Russia-gate scandal and portray President Trump as delusional for doubting what all 17 intelligence agencies supposedly knew to be true.

In the Times’ White House Memo of June 25, correspondent Maggie Haberman mocked Trump for “still refus[ing] to acknowledge a basic fact agreed upon by 17 American intelligence agencies that he now oversees: Russia orchestrated the attacks, and did it to help get him elected.”

However, on Thursday, the Times – while leaving most of Haberman’s ridicule of Trump in place – noted in a correction that the relevant intelligence “assessment was made by four intelligence agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.”
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Mad Dog's Pathetic Syrian Chemical Attack Propaganda

Friday June 30, 2017

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It’s obvious Mad Dog and the war-makers take us for complete idiots.

On Wednesday Trump’s Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, otherwise fondly known as Mad Dog, said Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian government backed down on a chemical attack after a stern warning from the United States.

“It appears that they took the warning seriously,” Mad Dog told reporters. “They didn’t do it.”

It is common practice now for the government to make outrageous claims and not bother to offer a scintilla of evidence. This was certainly the case with Mad Dog’s claim earlier in the week that the evil al-Assad planned to gas his own people.

It’s equally common for the establishment media to not ask for evidence and report fantasy and fairy tales as granite-hard fact.

Members of Congress also take this fallacious “intelligence” as gospel truth, as demonstrated by Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. He said Trump will bomb the be-jesus out of Syria if they launch a chemical attack.
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