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

Search Results

for:

Peter Van Buren

Hidden Mics as Part of Government Surveillance Program

Thursday May 19, 2016

In another example of multi-dimensional clash among the Fourth Amendment, privacy, technology, and the surveillance state, hidden microphones that are part of a broad, public clandestine government surveillance program that has been operating around the San Francisco Bay Area have been exposed.

The FBI planted listening devices at bus stops and other public places trying to prove real estate investors in San Mateo and Alameda counties are guilty of bid rigging and fraud. FBI agents were previously caught hiding microphones inside light fixtures and at public spaces outside an Oakland Courthouse, between March 2010 and January 2011.
read on...

Film Review: National Bird Looks Deeply in the Drone War’s Abyss

Saturday May 7, 2016

National Bird, a new documentary by filmmaker Sonia Kennebeck, co-produced with Errol Morris and Wim Wenders, is a deep, multilayered, look into America’s drone wars, a tactic which became a strategy which became a post-9/11 policy. To many in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the world, America’s new national symbol is not the bald eagle, but a gray shadow overhead armed with Hellfire missiles.
read on...

Why Don’t the Candidates Talk About Afghanistan?

Tuesday April 19, 2016

undefined

Heading into its sixteenth year, with no endpoint in sight, America’s longest war is its least talked about.

Afghanistan has not come up in any Republican or Democratic debate, except perhaps as one of a list of countries where Islamic State must be destroyed (left out is the reality that no Islamic State existed in 2001 when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban, who, by the way, are still not defeated.)
read on...

Iraq Ranks In Ten Most Corrupt Countries In World, Again

Wednesday March 30, 2016

Iraq, the failed state that over 4,600 (and counting…) Americans died to free from some evil tyrant 13 years ago, is still ranking high internationally in something. Unfortunately, that something is corruption. A couple of other places where America has been intervening for freedom also made the list.
read on...

Guantánamo Parole Board Clears Victim of Mistaken Identity — After 13 Years

Wednesday January 27, 2016

This story makes me so angry that I can’t even come up with my usual snarky introduction. I only weep.

The Guantánamo parole board approved the release of a Yemeni “forever prisoner,” dismissing intelligence that imprisoned the man for 13 years without trial. And if that level of evil and scorn for justice doesn’t radicalize a 100 people to join ISIS, then nothing can.
read on...

US Now World’s Top Arms Dealer

Monday December 28, 2015

In most people’s minds, America’s biggest exports are things like iPhones made in China, or swank Levi’s made in China. But in fact, America is the world’s leading seller of one category of goods, and those goods are nearly 100% made in America: weapons.

Maybe not a huge surprise, given that America maintains the globe’s largest military itself, has the largest network of bases and installations around the world, and makes war, well, pretty much anywhere/everywhere it godd*amn feels like it. But check out some impressive numbers: foreign arms sales by the United States jumped by almost $10 billion in 2014, about 35 percent growth, even as the global weapons market remained flat and competition among suppliers increased. How’d where you work do this year? Did you realize 35 percent growth? Sounds like you’re in the wrong business, Skippy.
read on...

UAE Sends ‘Blackwater’ Colombian Mercenaries to Yemen

Monday November 30, 2015

So file this one under “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” subcategory, “Everything.”

American ally the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has dispatched hundreds of Colombian mercenaries to Yemen to fight in that country’s raging conflict, adding a volatile new element in a complex proxy war that has drawn in the United States and Iran, reports the New York Times.
read on...

New Report: US Aid to Afghanistan Basically Wasted or Stolen

Monday October 19, 2015

As Obama fails on another campaign promise, this one to end the war in Afghanistan, and as that war moves into its 15th year, it is important to remember the US has spent around $110 billion (no one knows the exact amount due to poor record keeping) to “rebuild” that beleaguered nation, so far. 

We say “so far” in that the spending continues, and like the end of the war itself, as no foreseeable end date.

So how is that rebuilding thingee going?

Not well, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which issued a report saying “The Afghan private sector has thus far failed to fulfill its potential as an engine of economic growth or an instrument of social inclusion.”
read on...

Snowden: NSA, GCHQ Using Your Phone to Spy on Others (and You)

Thursday October 15, 2015

You are a tool of the state, according to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NSA in the U.S., and its equivalent in the UK, GCHQ, are taking control of your phone not just to spy on you as needed, but also to use your device as a way to spy on others around you. You are a walking microphone, camera and GPS for spies.

Snowden, in a BBC interview, explained that for the most part intelligence agencies are not really looking to monitor your private phone communications per se. They are actually taking over full control of the phone to take photos or record ongoing conversations within earshot.
read on...

Subscribe

Authors

Tags