The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
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After a Twelve Year Mistake in Iraq, We Must Just March Home

Sunday March 22, 2015

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Twelve years ago last week, the US launched its invasion of Iraq, an act the late General William Odom predicted would turn out to be “the greatest strategic disaster in US history.”

Before the attack I was accused of exaggerating the potential costs of the war when I warned that it could end up costing as much as $100 billion. One trillion dollars later, with not one but two “mission accomplished” moments, we are still not done intervening in Iraq.
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A Family Business of Perpetual War

Sunday March 22, 2015

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Neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, run a remarkable family business: she has sparked a hot war in Ukraine and helped launch Cold War II with Russia – and he steps in to demand that Congress jack up military spending so America can meet these new security threats.

This extraordinary husband-and-wife duo makes quite a one-two punch for the Military-Industrial Complex, an inside-outside team that creates the need for more military spending, applies political pressure to ensure higher appropriations, and watches as thankful weapons manufacturers lavish grants on like-minded hawkish Washington think tanks.

Not only does the broader community of neoconservatives stand to benefit but so do other members of the Kagan clan, including Robert’s brother Frederick at the American Enterprise Institute and his wife Kimberly, who runs her own shop called the Institute for the Study of War.

Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution (which doesn’t disclose details on its funders), used his prized perch on the Washington Post’s op-ed page on Friday to bait Republicans into abandoning the sequester caps limiting the Pentagon’s budget, which he calculated at about $523 billion (apparently not counting extra war spending). Kagan called on the GOP legislators to add at least $38 billion and preferably more like $54 billion to $117 billion...
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Cold War II: This Time, The Commies Are In Washington

Saturday March 21, 2015

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The Regime in Washington is the only government asserting the supposed right to carry out summary executions anywhere on the face of the globe, so we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that it also claims the right to impose “sanctions” on foreign citizens who publicly criticize it. On March 11, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) added Russian academic Alexander Dugin to its roster of “individuals and entities to be sanctioned over Russia’s interference in Ukraine.”

This decree means that any property belonging to Dugin that is within reach of the Soyuz (aka the country formerly known as the United States of America) is subject to forfeiture, and US citizens who do business with the professor will face criminal prosecution under the Trading with the Enemy Act.

What did Dugin – a so-called “mad professor” who will inevitably be portrayed on film by Russell Crowe — do that merits this designation? He holds no government position, nor is he the chieftain of a private criminal syndicate. Dugin, an outspoken Russian nationalist, has been depicted as a species of terrorist – the intellectual leader of a “revisionist” movement in Russia.

It is his use of the written and spoken word that provoked the outrage of the Trotskyites controlling Washington’s war-making apparatus. Dugin’s heretical rejection of Washington’s imperial rule-set made him “one of the most dangerous people on the planet,” according to noted geostrategic analyst Glenn Beck.
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‘Ukraine New Spy Law Designed as Provocation, Opens Whole Can of Worms’

Friday March 20, 2015

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Below is an interview with RPI Director Daniel McAdams conducted by RT.

If Ukrainian draft law on intelligence comes into force, we might start seeing assassinations, bomb blasts, and psychological attacks in the Donbass region, says Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute.

Ukraine's parliament has passed a law allowing its intelligence units to carry out military operations in eastern Ukraine. If the President Petro Poroshenko signs the law, it would allow special services to infiltrate and operate in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk republics.

RT: How does this current move from Kiev correlate with the current peace process in east Ukraine?

Daniel McAdams: I think it’s a provocation and it is designed to be a provocation. The goal is stated clearly from Kiev and it’s echoed in Washington, and to a degree in Berlin, as well, which is that Ukraine needs to be whole again—that is the point they are making including eastern Ukraine and even Crimea. So it is meant to be a provocation.

The problem is the government in Kiev is operating with what in finance circles is called “moral hazard”—they feel they have the US particularly and the West in general behind them. So they feel they can engage in every moral reckless behavior because there are no consequences to the actions that they take. But if it does pass, I think it may give us some information, some indication as to what all of the visits from the CIA director to Kiev over the past year and a half were all about. And then we can probably start seeing things like assassinations in Donetsk and Lugansk, bombs going off, provocations, psychological operations. I think it opens the whole can of worms.
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Why Do American Weapons End Up in Our Enemies' Hands?

Thursday March 19, 2015

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It happens so often you wonder whether it is due to total ineptness or a deliberate policy to undermine our efforts overseas. It’s most likely a result of corruption and unintended consequences, combined with a foreign policy that makes it impossible to determine who are our friends are and who are our enemies. One would think that so many failures in arming others to do our bidding in our effort to control an empire would awaken our leaders and the American people and prompt policy changes.

A recent headline in Mother Jones read: “US Weapons Have A Nasty Habit of Going AWOL.” The report was about $500 million worth of military equipment that is unaccounted for in Yemen. Just as in so many other places, our policy of provoking civil strife in Yemen has been a complete failure. At one time it was announced that there was a great victory in a war being won with drones assisting groups that claimed to be on our side in the Yemen Civil War. As usual, we could have expected that these weapons would end up in the hands of the militants not on the side of United States and would never be accounted for.

There are numerous examples of how our foreign intervention backfires and actually helps the enemy. Just recently a headline announced: “CIA cash sometimes refills al-Qaeda coffers.”  This was a story of our government helping pay ransom to al-Qaeda for the release an Afghan diplomat. However this was a measly $5 million so it was not considered a big deal. Another headline just recently announced that, “Iraqi army downs two UK planes carrying weapons for ISIL.” The Iraqi army is supposed to be on our side, and many people believe the UK is also on our side as well. One thing for sure the American taxpayer pays for all this nonsense.
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Rep. Walter Jones: No More Dollars for Afghanistan

Wednesday March 18, 2015

US Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), an RPI Board Member, took to the House Floor yesterday to criticize the new Republican budget for its increased spending in Afghanistan. Spending on that "graveyard of empires," said Walter Jones, is an "absolute waste of taxpayers' money."

Rep. Jones cites the absurd situation, recently reported, that US money for places like Afghanistan is — even if inadvertently — winding up in the hands of al-Qaeda and other groups. The CIA, he pointed out, has been sending money to the Afghan leadership that ended up in a slush fund used by the Afghans to pay off al-Qaeda to ransom Afghan officials.
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White House Email Archiving Office Exempts Self from FOIA Disclosures

Wednesday March 18, 2015

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Hot on the high heels of the Clinton email atrocity, where one individual determined for her own campaign and indeed for all of history which parts of her work as a taxpayer-paid government official would be forever sent down the Memory Hole, the White House announced it is deleting a federal regulation that subjects its Office of Administration to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), making official an unofficial policy under Presidents Bush and Obama to simply reject requests for records to that office.

And in case you proles still have not got it, the White House announcement comes in the middle of “Sunshine Week,” an annual nationwide celebration of access to public information.

And in case you proles really still have not gotten the message, the White House made the announcement on March 17, National Freedom of Information Day.
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Republican 'Balanced' Budget Boosts Military Spending

Tuesday March 17, 2015


The Republican House Budget Committee just released its plan for how to balance the budget. One little catch is that the proposal talks only of the possibility of this happening in 10 years. The Democrats, they complain, don’t even try to balance the budget. Well, at least they’re more honest about it. It used to be that we looked at five-year plans in the socialist systems, but here we are facing a conservative proposal to “maybe” balance the budget in 10 years.

This achievement will occur, they claim, without raising taxes. But everybody knows Republicans are just as capable of raising taxes as are the Democrats. They are certainly not bashful about increasing spending. However this budget report claims that they can cut $5.5 trillion in spending — a more aggressive goal than they have ever before proposed. They emphasize a fairer and a simpler tax system to promote job creation and a healthy economy, which I think is nothing more than wishful thinking. 

The claim is also made that the country will be put on a path to “paying off the debt by growing the economy and making government more efficient, effective, and accountable.” The claim that has been made by conservatives over many decades has always been that all we need to do is lower the rate of taxes and get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse and the economy will thrive and the debt will go down. There’s never a suggestion that it is necessary to achieve limited government or that policies have to change, such as our attitude toward the welfare state and certainly the warfare state.
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The Wolf Is Guarding the Hen House: The Government’s War on Cyberterrorism

Tuesday March 17, 2015

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Nothing you write, say, text, tweet or share via phone or computer is private anymore. As constitutional law professor Garrett Epps points out, “Big Brother is watching…. Big Brother may be watching you right now, and you may never know. Since 9/11, our national life has changed forever. Surveillance is the new normal.”

This is the reality of the internet-dependent, plugged-in life of most Americans today.

A process which started shortly after 9/11 with programs such as Total Information Awareness (the predecessor to the government’s present surveillance programs) has grown into a full-fledged campaign of warrantless surveillance, electronic tracking and data mining, thanks to federal agents who have been given carte blanche access to the vast majority of electronic communications in America. Their methods completely undermine constitution safeguards, and yet no federal agency, president, court or legislature has stepped up to halt this assault on our rights.

For the most part, surveillance, data mining, etc., is a technological, jargon-laden swamp through which the average American would prefer not to wander. Consequently, most Americans remain relatively oblivious to the government’s ever-expanding surveillance powers, appear unconcerned about the fact that the government is spying on them, and seem untroubled that there is no way of opting out of this system. This state of delirium lasts only until those same individuals find themselves arrested or detained for something they did, said or bought that runs afoul of the government’s lowering threshold for what constitutes criminal activity.
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US Intel Stands Pat on MH-17 Shoot-down

Monday March 16, 2015

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Despite the high stakes involved in the confrontation between nuclear-armed Russia and the United States over Ukraine, the US intelligence community has not updated its assessment on a critical turning point of the crisis – the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 – since five days after the crash last July 17, according to the office of the Director of National Intelligence.

On Thursday, when I inquired about arranging a possible briefing on where that US intelligence assessment stands, DNI spokesperson Kathleen Butler sent me the same report that was distributed by the DNI on July 22, 2014, which relied heavily on claims being made about the incident on social media.

So, I sent a follow-up e-mail to Butler saying: “are you telling me that US intelligence has not refined its assessment of what happened to MH-17 since July 22, 2014?”

Her response: “Yes. The assessment is the same.”

I then wrote back: “I don’t mean to be difficult but that’s just not credible. US intelligence has surely refined its assessment of this important event since July 22.”

When she didn’t respond, I sent her some more detailed questions describing leaks that I had received about what some US intelligence analysts have since concluded, as well as what the German intelligence agency, the BND, reported to a parliamentary committee last October, according to Der Spiegel.
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