The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
Subscribe to the Institute View Us on YouTube Follow Us On Twitter Join Us on Facebook Join Us at Google Plus

Search Results

for:

The National-Security State's Murder of Two Americans

1280Px Allende Supporters

A Chilean court ruled this week
 that the U.S. national-security state conspired to murder American citizens Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi in Chile in 1973. The brutal act occurred during the violent military coup in which the Chilean military, with the full support of the U.S. government, ousted the democratically elected president of the country, Salvador Allende, and replaced him with an unelected brutal military dictatorship headed by Chilean General Augusto Pinochet.

For years, the CIA and the U.S. military falsely denied any complicity in the murders of Horman and Teruggi. After many years of false denials, however, the U.S. State Department released a memorandum confirming that a secret U.S. official investigation had revealed that U.S. intelligence had played a role in the murders of both men.

The Chilean court has now confirmed what the State Department said in that crucial memo.

Why did U.S. national-security state officials murder Horman and Teruggi? Because Horman and Teruggi were leftists — progressives — socialists — whatever label you want to put on people who subscribe to the economic philosophy of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and other people who believe in the welfare-state way of life. In the minds of U.S. national-security state officials, that made them “subversives” or “communists” — i.e., enemies of the state.
read on...

Empire's Age-Old Aim: Wealth and Power

Cheney

In his very excellent book, King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild registers a chapter-long lament near the book's end that even though in the preceding pages he has chronicled in an unprecedented manner the crimes against humanity of Leopold's Congo enterprise, so what? Such crimes were almost a concomitant of colonial empire. Britain, France, Germany, the United States -- all the so-called civilized colonial powers -- were guilty of such crimes.

Whether murder and plunder in India, slaughter in Algeria, devastation in Cameroon, or torture and massacre in the Philippines, few western powers can rightfully claim innocence. And, perhaps most worrisome, their national myths mask or even convert most of the crimes, and what the myths don't eliminate or alter poor education and memory lapses do.

Surely, however, at this opening to the 21st Century, we have made some progress. Our constant rhetoric -- particularly from Washington -- asserts that we have. International criminal justice and human rights are pursued with relish, are they not?

Not according to the example of Richard Bruce Cheney. As has been the case since humankind began to organize itself, Dick Cheney believes that wealth and power -- his and his cronies wealth and power foremost -- are still the relevant strategic objectives of empire. King Leopold of Belgium is not dead, simply reincarnated in a more modern form. Torturing people is dependent on a nation's supposed needs, killing people on the expediency of policy, waging war on monetary and commercial gain, and lying to the people is a  highly reputable tactic in pursuit of each. Leopold would love Dick Cheney.
read on...

Celebrate Independence Day By Opposing Government Tyranny

This week Americans will enjoy Independence Day with family cookouts and fireworks. Flags will be displayed in abundance. Sadly, however, what should be a celebration of the courage of those who risked so much to oppose tyranny will instead be turned into a celebration of government, not liberty. The mainstream media and opportunistic politicians have turned Independence Day into the opposite of what was intended. 
 
The idea of opposing — by force if necessary — a tyrannical government has been turned into a celebration of tyrannical government itself!
read on...

Cold War Renewed With A Vengeance While Washington Again Lies

Obama Cameron

The Cold War made a lot of money for the military/security complex for four decades dating from Churchill’s March 5, 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri declaring a Soviet “Iron Curtain” until Reagan and Gorbachev ended the Cold War in the late 1980s. During the Cold War Americans heard endlessly about “the Captive Nations.” The Captive Nations were the Baltics and the Soviet bloc, usually summarized as “Eastern Europe.”

These nations were captive because their foreign policies were dictated by Moscow, just as these same Captive Nations, plus the UK, Western Europe, Canada, Mexico, Columbia, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Georgia, and Ukraine, have their foreign policies dictated today by Washington. Washington intends to expand the Captive Nations to include Azerbaijan, former constituent parts of Soviet Central Asia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia.

During the Cold War Americans thought of Western Europe and Great Britain as independent sovereign countries. Whether they were or not, they most certainly are not today. We are now almost seven decades after WWII, and US troops still occupy Germany. No European government dares to take a stance different from that of the US Department of State.
read on...

Hell No! Taxpayers Shouldn’t Go To Syria

Obama Maliki

Barack Obama has rekindled 1968. Back then the folly of Vietnam had become so self-evident and omnipresent that the most power-obsessed President in US history was driven from office and his bloody escalation of the war on Vietnam was stopped in its tracks by the overwhelming sentiment of the American people.

Obama has now created another such defining moment in his request for $500 million to arm the Syrian “opposition”. Does this clueless man not know we have already done that? Has this social media savvy gasbag not viewed the ISIS YouTube channels where he could see tens of millions worth of American war equipment on parade under the black flag of these terrorists?
Obama Proposes $500 Million to Aid Syrian Rebels

Program to Train and Equip Moderate Opposition Would Expand U.S. Role in Civil War
Has the President not noticed that these “enemies” were trained as “friends” in order to fight across the now non-existent border in Syria? Some of them apparently even got their diplomas at the CIA training camp in Jordan. Did they not became battle-hardened trying to overthrow the Alawite government of Bashir Assad — that is, a second cousin to the Shiite sect that is allegedly on our side in Iraq’s sectarian carnage?
read on...

Ron Paul: No More US Aid to Syria Insurgents; Better for House to Impeach than Sue Obama

Ron Paul, speaking with Neil Cavuto on Fox News, explains that President Barack Obama’s proposal to spend a half-billion dollars on training and arming Syria insurgents will hurt Americans while helping the military industrial complex. Paul, RPI’s chairman and founder, also argues that the House of Representatives would do better to impeach Obama for unconstitutional actions than to follow Speaker of the House John Boehner’s plan to sue Obama.
read on...

Iraq: The Things Warmongers Said

Neocons

Iraq is in turmoil — with ISIS controlling large areas of the country — but the truth is that it's been in turmoil since the illegal 2003 invasion.

2013 was Iraq's bloodiest year since 2008, but as I wrote here members of the elite political class and warmongers in the West weren't interested.

Iraq post-invasion had become the greatest non-news story of the modern era. The people who could not stop talking about Iraq in 2002/3 and telling how much they cared about ordinary Iraqis were strangely silent. Instead they were devoting their energies into propagandizing for another Middle Eastern military 'intervention', this time against Syria.

Now that Iraq is back in the western news headlines again, with calls for “intervention” to counter ISIS, it's worth bearing in mind what the architects of the Iraq war and the cheerleaders for it said in the lead up and during the invasion about the “threat” from Saddam's WMDs and how toppling a secular dictator would help the so-called 'war on terror' and bring peace and security to the region.
read on...

Obama's Self-Made Foreign Policy Problem

The Obama Administration is talking too much.

Kerry went to Egypt, delivered money and weapons, and was shown the finger over his human rights laments. Kerry went to Iraq, delivered some military support, and demanded a "unity government." Maliki's government already includes Kurds and Sunnis and he just won elections. So Kerry gets shown the finger. Kerry went to Erbil and demanded that the Kurds stick to Iraq. They have all the oil they want. Kerry gets shown the finger. Obama wants more sanctions on Russia but needs the Europeans to join. But why should the Europeans ruin their economies over this? Obama will be likely shown the finger.


read on...

Ron Paul, the CIA, and Dr. Zhivago

Zhivago CIA

It is no secret that Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel Dr. Zhivago influenced RPI Chairman and Founder Ron Paul. Indeed, Dr. Zhivago and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged are the only two works of fiction included in the list of 48 books at the end of Paul’s The Revolution: A Manifesto that Paul says influenced him over the years. What has long been a secret, though, is that the United States Central Intelligence Agency played a significant role in helping promote the Pasternak novel.

A peek at the influence Dr. Zhivago had on Paul may be found in ABC News and National Public Radio profiles of Paul from 2011 that report on how Paul reading in his 20s a copy of Dr. Zhivago that his mother had given him put Paul on course reading many other books that helped him develop his understanding of libertarian ideas. This reading led directly to Paul first running for Congress in 1974 and continuing to communicate regarding political topics to this day. As Paul has explained many times, his runs for political office have been motivated largely by a desire to share ideas related to freedom with a larger audience.

Might Paul’s mother not have given him Dr. Zhivago if the CIA had not boosted the book’s popularity? Without reading the book, may Paul not have proceeded in the study that led him to help build support for liberty and nonintervention in the US and abroad?
read on...

Federal Court Rules Government’s No-Fly List Is Unconstitutional

DHS

There is a major decision out of Oregon where U.S. District Judge Anna Brown has ruled that the government’s no-fly list is unconstitutional since there is no meaningful way to contest inclusion of the list barring you from commercial flights. Brown issued a 65 page ruling with the holding that the “inclusion on the no-fly list constitutes a significant deprivation of their liberty interests in international travel.” It is a refreshing opinion from the federal courts which tend to be highly deferential to the government in this area.

Central to the decision is Brown’s recognition that “international travel is not a mere convenience or luxury in this modern world. Indeed, for many international travel is a necessary aspect of liberties sacred to members of a free society.” We have all heard horror stories of how people are mistakenly placed on this list and how they find themselves in an endless bureaucratic process to correct such mistakes. 

The sheer stupidity of many of these mistakes has been shocking with government officials barring people with similarly sounding names to terrorists like Bin Laden or the cavalier addition of names despite the huge cost to the individuals. The list is a CYA moment for many officials who want to be more safe than sorry, but those unfairly placed on the list find themselves in a governmental nightmare of red tape and delay.
read on...


Authors

Tags