Today's Benghazi Committee hearings will not focus on the central issue: US interventionist foreign policy which set the stage for the inevitable attack that followed. Hillary Clinton made the point in her opening statement that US embassies have been attacked many times in the past and she is right. But no one wants to question why they attack. Here's a hint: it's not because we are rich and free. Democrats and Republicans are out to score political points from the hearings. Both agree on the policies. Both agree on interventionism. Without major changes, neither will do a thing to change the root cause of such events: US interventionism. Today's Liberty Report explores questions you will not hear in today's hearing... read on...
Fox News (10/14/15) reported last week that Cuba has sent Gen. Leopoldo Cintra Frias and hundreds of troops to Syria to assist the Russian and Assad governments in “operating Russian tanks.” This explosive claim was soon echoed by James Bloodworth in the Daily Beast (10/16/15) and subsequently spread widely on social media.
A Cuban troop presence in Syria would be a blockbuster story indeed—undermining the easing of tensions between Cuba and the United States while serving as a huge embarrassment for the Obama administration, which has spent much political capital restoring relations with the socialist island nation. There’s only one problem: The story is looking increasingly bunk.
Of course, it’s impossible to ever prove a negative: One cannot prove there are no Cuban soldiers in Syria, any more than one can prove there are not any members of the San Antonio Police Department or Nepalese Army there. Thus far, though, we have about as much evidence of those two scenarios as we do that Cuban military are helping out the Assad government with tanks.
Two days after the initial Fox News report, putative socialist James Bloodworth, who’s madesomething of a career of browbeating enemies of American and British foreign policy under the guise of Real Socialism™, jumped at the chance to do what both he and the Daily Beast do best: hyping America and Britain’s war effort in Syria by bashing its opposition in tabloid tones. read on...
It is very, very difficult to discuss Benghazi and Clinton without almost immediately dipping deep into partisan politics cesspool, and no doubt any hearings she will testify at on Thursday will be ugly and deeply partisan. About half of the people reading this just clicked away to somewhere else. Thoughts on this topic are just that polarized.
But let’s not give up too easily. There are important questions about Clinton’s handling of Benghazi that are relative to her desire to be president. Here are some of them I hope someone will ask her. read on...
Four years into a pointless intervention in Syria -- with several more years of US "regime change" planning beforehand -- the utter disaster that the neocons and interventionists have produced is laid bare before the world. Assad is in power, al-Qaeda and ISIS are strengthened, Syria is devastated, the US is billions of dollars poorer. The Russian entry into the fight against ISIS and al-Qaeda should be a clear signal to the Obama Administration that this is not our war. The message of today's Liberty Report is clear: Run, don't walk from this neocon misadventure. read on...
The US effort to train and equip Syrian freedom fighters battling to bring democracy to Damascus and usurp a brutal dictator has been a smashing success (count the instances of sarcasm there).
Take ISIS for example. The Pentagon knew that the opposition groups the West and its regional allies were supporting could morph into something beyond anyone’s control. Recall the following passage from a secret DoD document dated 2012: “If the situation unravels, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”
Well, the situation did “unravel” and sure enough, one group of former “freedom fighters” metamorphosed into a band of sword-wielding, black-flag waving desert bandits who did indeed establish a Salafist Principality in eastern Syria with a “capital” at Raqqa.
And while that surely takes the top spot on the list of “most absurd outcomes from US meddling in Syria,” a close second was this year’s “train and equip” program run by the Pentagon.
This was a separate program from those run by the CIA (which supports the Free Syrian Army that’s now under siege by Russia and Iran) and the aim was to appropriately “vet” as many as 5,400 anti-ISIS (supposedly) fighters by the end of the year. read on...
If you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you have just been promoted to the top of the government’s terrorism watch list. read on...
Tax protester Irwin Schiff was sentenced to 13 years in prison for talking about his book, which the government had banned. He died of cancer on Saturday at age 87, chained to a prison hospital bed. Appeals for him to spend his last days with his family were denied by the government. Today's Liberty Report pays tribute to Schiff and to all the other truth-tellers and whistleblowers who find themselves in the government's crosshairs and end up denied life, liberty, and happiness... read on...
We’ll just put this bluntly: when you, as a country, do something incredibly stupid from a foreign policy perspective, you open the door for your global critics and adversaries to i) call you out on it publicly, and ii) use your gross incompetence and general disregard for anything that even approximates common sense, to their geopolitical advantage.
And make no mistake, in Syria, Washington, Riyadh, and Doha did something incredibly stupid.
They financed, armed, and trained a hodgepodge of Sunni extremists in Syria in an attempt to destabilize a regime that was deemed to be unfriendly to the interests of the West and its regional allies.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but from the perspective of human suffering, the results have been simply horrific: hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced.
From a reputational perspective, the results have been equally catastrophic. Not only did the US, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar have a hand in creating the group that ultimately morphed into what we never tire of characterizing as an insane band of white basketball shoe-wearing, black flag-waving, sword-wielding desert bandits bent on establishing a medieval caliphate, but subsequent efforts to arm and train “moderate” rebels were wildly unsuccessful, and the entire effort culminated in the embarrassing admission that the Pentagon’s latest “program” - designed to field 5,400 fighters by the end of the year - had only managed to produce “four or five” soldiers at a cost to the US taxpayer of $41 million. read on...
The US Treasury’s recent announcement that the government will reach the debt ceiling on November 3 means Congress will soon be debating raising the government’s borrowing limit again. Any delay in, or opposition to, raising the debt ceiling will inevitably be met with hand-wringing over Congress’ alleged irresponsibility. But the real irresponsible act would be for Congress to raise the debt ceiling.
Cutting up its credit card is the only way to make Congress reduce spending. Anyone who doubts this should listen to the bipartisan whining over how sequestration has so drastically reduced spending that there is literally nothing left to cut. But, according to the Heritage Foundation, sequestration has only reduced spending from $3.6 trillion to $3.5 trillion. Only in DC would a less than one percent spending reduction be considered a draconian cut. read on...
1) While Hafez Al-Assad was indisputably in power, his son was not groomed for succession, and was basically parachuted out of his London Ophthalmologist practice into Damascus. There he immediately became a puppet of the Alawite Mukhabarak, something he eventually managed to partially minimize.
2) In the original protests, Assad initially attempted negotiations, but, partly due to ingrained behavior and partly due to the quite considerably regime casualties even in the "peaceful" phase, supporters of a "forceful" approach within Syrian security won out, and attempted to solve the issue by force.
3) Temporarily, this put Assad himself between all chairs. The opposition viewed him as a traitor (due to the security organization being very violent despite orders to the contrary) and the security state himself viewed him as a weakling due to his non-violent orders.
The American assistance that "Assad must go", as a precondition of entering any negotiations was, under that background, seen as sheer bad faith by the Russians. Assad could be utilized as a tool to rein in the Syrian Mukhabarat, and he was/is certainly more controllable/civilized then the people actually running the various Mukhabarats, removing him would achieve nothing, other then the Mukhabarat fighting completely gloves off for its own survival. read on...
