The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
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Is FBI Lying About 'Russiagate'?

Tuesday January 23, 2018

Are we supposed to believe that a critical five months of text messages between two plotting (and illicitly connected) anti-Trump FBI agents have disappeared due to technical errors? Much more likely -- and more commonly, as Jim Bovard points out in a recent Hill article -- it is the FBI manipulating evidence and destroying evidence to keep the public from knowing what they really are up to. In this case, it appears FBI agents were colluding with others in the US intelligence community to: 1) prevent Donald Trump from being elected president; and then 2) when that didn't work, to undermine him with baseless charges of foreign collusion in the hopes he would be removed from office. The story continues to unfold, but as it does the "Russiagate" narrative seems to be melting into a "FBI-gate" reality. More in today's Liberty Report...
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It’s Time We Saw Economic Sanctions For What They Really Are – War Crimes

Tuesday January 23, 2018

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The first pathetic pieces of wreckage from North Korean fishing boats known as “ghost ships” to be found this year are washing up on the coast of northern Japan. These are the storm-battered remains of fragile wooden boats with unreliable engines in which North Korean fishermen go far out to sea in the middle of winter in a desperate search for fish.

Often all that survives is the shattered wooden hull of the boat cast up on the shore, but in some cases the Japanese find the bodies of fishermen who died of hunger and thirst as they drifted across the Sea of Japan. Occasionally, a few famished survivors are alive and explain that their engine failed or they ran out of fuel or they were victims of some other fatal mishap.

The number of “ghost ships” is rising with no fewer than 104 found in 2017, which is more than in any previous year, though the real figure must be higher because many boats will have sunk without trace in the 600 miles of rough sea between North Korea and Japan.

The reason so many fishermen risk and lose their lives is hunger in North Korea where fish is the cheapest form of protein.
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Why Does Washington Hate Bashar al-Assad?

Tuesday January 23, 2018

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The Donald Trump administration is planning to install a 30,000 strong armed “security force” in northern Syria along the borders with Turkey and Iraq. This presumably will tie together and support the remaining rag-tags of allegedly pro-democracy rebels and will fit in with existing and proposed US bases. The maneuver is part of a broader plan to restructure Syria to suit the usual crop of neocon geniuses in Washington that have slithered their way back into the White House and National Security Council, to include renewed demands that the country’s President Bashar al-Assad “must go,” reiterated by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last Wednesday.
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Turkey Vs. Syrian Kurds: Whose Side Are We On?

Monday January 22, 2018

With Ankara's recent military incursion into Syria to fight Afrin-based Kurdish forces, the US finds itself in a bizarre proxy war with its longtime NATO ally, Turkey. Turkish airplanes are literally taking off from the same airbase to bomb the Kurds as American planes are taking off from to arm the Kurds. US policy in Syria to create an autonomous Kurdish region to facilitate the continued (illegal) US military presence in the country is reckless and unsustainable. It is also absurd. For more on this strange state of affairs, tune in to today's Liberty Report...
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Rex Tillerson at Hoover

Monday January 22, 2018

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On Wednesday morning last week, I, as a research fellow with the Hoover Institution, got to attend a speech by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. It was followed by a Q&A session with former Secretary of State and my Hoover colleague Condoleezza Rice. Unfortunately, questions from the audience were not allowed. The talk was about the Trump administration’s policy on Syria. The State Department has already released a transcript of his speech.

After the first few minutes of niceties, Tillerson got to his main topic: Syria. He listed many of the ways that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is bad, the main one being killing many of his own people. I thought Tillerson would then go to say what U.S. policy on Syria would be. But he didn’t do so immediately.

Instead, he segued to ISIS. You can read his comments for yourself, but here are three relevant segments.
The civil war in Syria was horrific in and of itself. But Syria was thrown into an even greater state of turmoil with the emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. This was an aspiring terror-state inside the borders of Iraq and Syria. The conflict between the regime and various opposition groups fighting to change Assad’s grip on power created the conditions for the rapid expansion of ISIS in 2013 and 2014. ISIS originally emerged from the ashes of al-Qaida in Iraq, a group Assad had covertly backed. Evidence suggests Assad also abetted ISIS by releasing known terrorists from Syrian prisons and turning a blind eye to ISIS’s growth. ISIS exploited the instability and lack of centralized authority in Syria to set up what it falsely claimed was a "caliphate," with the Syrian city of Raqqa as its capital.
Later...
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What to Really Expect From the Government Shutdown

Monday January 22, 2018

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It’s deja-vu all over again, as baseball legend Yogi Berra might have said. The politicians and media are telling us the world is coming to an end because a “compromise” could not be made at the 11th hour to keep the Federal government in business. Republicans blame Democrats for the shutdown over their insistence on legislation to benefit about 700,000 “Dreamers” -- immigrants who were brought illegally in to the country as children. Democrats make the shutdown all about Donald Trump, hoping to gain political points from his unpopular status.
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Turkish Tanks Cross Into Syria As Ground Offensive Against US-Backed Militia Begins

Monday January 22, 2018

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Early on Sunday, Turkish ground forces crossed the border and pushed into northern Syria’s Afrin province on Sunday, Ankara said after launching artillery and air strikes on a U.S.-backed Kurdish militia it aims to sweep from its border.

Turkey sent armored divisions into northwest Syria after a day of airstrikes as part of 'Operation Olive Branch' which bombed Kurdish YPG forces ("People's Protection Units") in and around Afrin to drive the US-allied Kurdish militia from the area. Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army fighters along with Turkish troops are now moving into the area, according to state-run Anadolu news agency.

Quoted by Reuters, Erdogan also accused some of Turkey’s allies of providing the YPG with 2,000 plane shipments and 5,000 truckloads of ammunition; the comments were clearly aimed at the United States.

According to the local military, Turkish forces forces started the ground phase as part of ‘Olive Branch’ in the north-western Syrian region of Afrin, with Hurriyet reporting that the Turkish military has so far faced no serious resistance from Kurdish forces, which has retreated to towns and villages.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim confirmed that tanks and military vehicles had begun to cross the Syrian border, according toHaberturk. They were said to advance roughly five kilometers into the Afrin region. Yildirim also said the Turkish military, NATO’s second-largest, would create a 30-km (19-mile) “safe zone” in the  region
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RPI's Daniel McAdams: ‘Nothing New’ in New National Defense Strategy

Friday January 19, 2018

Defense Secretary James Mattis unveiled the new US National Defense Strategy which has shifted the focus away from terrorism as the main threat to looking at Russia and China as the main threat to the US. It is a move back to the neocon "Wolfowitz Doctrine" of the 1990s, RPI Director Daniel McAdams tells RT, which stated that the US will use everything in its power to prevent a rival from rising to challenge it. Our hyper-interventionist foreign policy consistently creates outcomes opposite of our stated goals and this new strategy only continues this process...
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'Boss Tweet’s' Generals Already Run the Show

Friday January 19, 2018

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Much has been written about our Twitterer-in-Chief and the tortured response to his presidency, particularly within the GOP.  As a recent example, Frank Bruni of the New York Times lamented the fate of Senator Lindsey Graham, who has now become one of Donald Trump’s biggest defenders on mainstream shows such as “Meet the Press”. Bruni, however, reminds us that during the presidential campaign of 2016, Graham described then candidate Trump as the “world’s biggest jackass”, even as he now praises POTUS, thereby personifying “his party’s spastic, incoherent, humiliating response to Trump across time and its fatally misguided surrender.”
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What To Expect In 2018 - With Special Guest Gerald Celente

Thursday January 18, 2018

Why are the rich getting richer? Are they just smarter than the rest of us? Or do the "too big to fail" connected corporations have a hotline to Washington for government assistance? And what about the US involvement in the Middle East? Will it increase or decrease this year? And why? Internationally-renowned trends forecaster Gerald Celente joins today's Liberty Report to tell us what we can expect for 2018..
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