By Ron Paul
Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) found himself in hot water recently over comments he made in defense of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, who faces war crimes charges over his alleged conduct while serving in combat overseas. Gallagher is charged with stabbing a 15 year old ISIS member while in custody, of taking photos posing with the corpse of the teen, and with killing several civilians. Defending Gallagher recently, Hunter put his own record up next to the SEAL to suggest that he’s an elected Congressman who has done worse things in battle than Gallagher. That’s where Hunter’s defense earned him some perhaps unwanted attention. While participating in the first “Battle of Fallujah” in early 2007, by Hunter’s own account he and his fellow soldiers killed hundreds of innocent civilians, including women and children. They fired mortars into the city and killed at random. In the sanitized world of US mainstream media reporting on US wars overseas, we do not hear about non-combatants being killed by Americans. How many times has there been any reporting on the birth defects that Iraqis continue to suffer in the aftermath of US attacks with horrific weapons like depleted uranium and white phosphorus? Rep. Hunter described his philosophy when fighting in Iraq: “You go in fast and hard, you kill people, you hit them in the face and then you get out…We’re going to hurt you and then we’re going to leave. And if you want to be nice to America, we’ll be nice to you. If you don’t want to be nice to us, we’re going to slap you again.” This shows how much Duncan Hunter does not understand about war. When he speaks of hitting people in the face until they are nice to America, he doesn’t seem to realize that the people of Fallujah – and all of Iraq – never did a thing to the US to deserve that hit in the face. The war was launched on the basis of lies and cooked-up intelligence by many of the people who are serving in the current Administration. And that brings us to the real war criminals. Rep. Duncan Hunter and his fellow soldiers may have killed hundreds of innocent civilians and even felt justified. Their superior officers, after all, established the rules of engagement. Above those superior officers, going up and beyond to the policymakers, the lie was sold to the American people to justify a war of choice against a country that could not have threatened us if it wanted to. Vice President Dick Cheney knew what he was doing when he kept returning to the CIA headquarters, strong-arming analysts to make the intelligence fit the chosen policy. John Bolton and the other neocons knew what they were doing when they made claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction they knew were false. The Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans played its role in selling the lie. So did the media. Edward Gallagher will face trial and possibly jail for his actions. Rep. Duncan Hunter may even face punishment – though perhaps only at the ballot box – for his admitted crimes. But until those at the top who continue to lie and manipulate us into war for their own gain face justice, the real criminals will continue to go free and we will continue pursuing a suicidal neocon foreign policy.
By Jacob G. Hornberger
Lamenting dictatorship in Cuba, the U.S. government has decided to tighten restrictions on the freedom of Americans to travel to Cuba. Never mind that the restrictions were not enacted by Congress and signed into law by President Trump. When it comes to fighting totalitarian dictatorship, the reasoning goes, it’s necessary to adopt dictatorial policies here at home. Freedom of travel has long been considered a fundamental, natural, God-given right with which no government, not even the U.S. government, can legitimately infringe. Recall the Declaration of Independence, which Americans will be celebrating on the Fourth of July. It holds that liberty is among the rights with which all people have been endowed by their Creator. When God endows people with certain rights, including the right of freedom of travel, it goes without saying that Caesar behaves illegitimately when he infringes on such rights. The U.S. national-security establishment, which has long been the driving force behind the U.S. government’s forever war against Cuba, would no doubt point to the fact that Cuba is still headed by a communist regime. That of course was the mindset of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA throughout the Cold War, when, U.S. officials maintained, the communists from Russia, China, and elsewhere were coming to get us and take over our nation as part of a supposed worldwide communist conspiracy that was supposedly based in Moscow. Cuba, they steadfastly maintained, was part of that worldwide communist conspiracy — a communist dagger pointed at America’s neck from only 90 miles away. The reasoning was idiotic at the time and continues to be idiotic. The communists were never coming to get us and they are still not coming to get us. And communist Cuba is not going to stab us in the neck. You’d have a hard time, however, convincing the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA of that. Along with Trump, they have succeeded in initiating a new Cold War against China, especially with Trump’s trade war, which is designed to produce economic impoverishment in China. And of course there is the ongoing effort to reignite another Cold War against Russia. There are problems, of course, with this anti-communist narrative. Notwithstanding the supposed nuclear threat posed by communist North Korea, which is used to justify keeping thousands of U.S. troops in Korea, President Trump has stated that he has fallen in love with North Korea’s communist dictator. As the Pentagon, CIA, and NSA are learning, it’s difficult to get Americans all hyped up about the threat that a poor Third World nation supposedly poses to “national security” when the president and that country’s dictator are loving and embracing each other. Of course, there is also communist Vietnam, which is situated in a part of the world where more dominoes could begin falling to the communists any day now. Okay, sure, South Vietnam fell to the Reds more than 40 years ago and more dominoes have not yet started falling. But that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t start falling tomorrow. Maybe the Pentagon and the CIA should present a secret invasion plan to the president, one that could entail bombing Hanoi and mining Haiphong harbor. There could also be an Operation Northwoods or Operation Tonkin to make it clear that we are just defending ourselves from a communist attack on the United States. Isn’t it time for Americans to demand a stop to all this anti-Cuba, anti-China, anti-Russia, anti-North Korea, anti-Vietnam, anti-Venezuela, anti-Nicaragua, and anti-communist idiocy, especially given that so many Democrats and their supporters are now self-avowed socialists? What business does the U.S. government have trying to increase the suffering of the Cuban people or waging a forever war against communism when we could easily end up with a socialist in the White House? More important, isn’t it time for Americans to demand a stop to the destruction of their own liberty, even when it’s done in the name of protecting our liberty from a supposed communist threat? Isn’t it time for Americans to clarify that they have the natural, God-given right to travel anywhere they want and trade with whomever they want anywhere in the world? What is the point of celebrating the Declaration of Independence when the president and his minions have omnipotent dictatorial rein to destroy our natural, God-given rights whenever they want and without even the semblance of a law enacted by Congress? Given that the U.S. government has become the biggest destroyer of our freedom, isn’t it time to exercise the right in the Declaration of Independence for Americans to alter our form of government by dismantling its post-World War II national-security state structure and restoring the limited-government republic originally envisioned by the Framers and that remained our form of government for more than 150 years? This article was originally published at The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Six years ago undercover CIA officer and NSA contractor Edward Snowden came out from the shadows to reveal that he was responsible for the greatest leak of secret government information in US history. Americans learned that the government was not spying on terrorists to keep us safe, but was actually much more interested in spying on us. The revelations led to "reform" in the form of the "FREEDOM Act." But have we recovered any of our privacy protections...or are we worse off...?
While President Trump continues to pile up one bad trade policy after another, Fed Chairman Powell indicated that he's ready to pile on too! More money printing, more debt creation and more QE look to be in America's future. Look out below!
Secretly recorded while speaking off the record to a group of supporters, Secretary of State Pompeo revealed that US policy toward Venezuela has been a disaster and that the US government has lied from the beginning about the level of support for the opposition and the ease of "restoring democracy" to the country. Will Pompeo be made to pay for revealing an inconvenient truth?
Secretly recorded while speaking off the record to a group of supporters, Secretary of State Pompeo revealed that US policy toward Venezuela has been a disaster and that the US government has lied from the beginning about the level of support for the opposition and the ease of "restoring democracy" to the country. Will Pompeo be made to pay for revealing an inconvenient truth?
Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) has found himself in the hot seat after defending a Navy SEAL on trial for wantonly killing civilians and stabbing prisoners while in Iraq. On a podcast, Hunter wondered what the big deal was - after all, he's responsible for hundreds of civilians killed in Fallujah. It sounds like a war crime, but perhaps the real war criminals are the neocon liars and a feckless president who sent the military into Iraq in the first place. If Hunter belongs on the dock, so does half the Bush Administration.
By Kerry McDonald
[Excerpted from FEE.org] This is my 100th article at FEE.org, so here are 100 reasons to homeschool your kids!
Read the rest at FEE.org By Liberty Report Staff George W. Bush was elected to office promising a "humble" foreign policy. He specifically said: "I'm not so sure it's the role of the United States to go around the world and say 'This is the way it's gotta be.'" In hindsight, it's almost impossible to believe that those words were spoken by George W. Bush. At the time, the perpetual war neocons were so-so on Bush. They much preferred John McCain to be the Republican nominee for president. But they could work with Bush, and boy did they work with him. George W.'s administration would be honeycombed with neocons, from top to bottom. By the beginning of 2002, Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo would report: To show you how much presidential elections, or any sort of elections, mean in this country: the [neocons] are not-so-quietly infiltrating a White House whose election most of them fiercely opposed, or supported only tepidly. Humble Bush morphed into pre-emptive war and nation-building Bush; which is in-line with the neocon agenda of American world hegemony. We all know that the perpetual wars in the Middle East have been a complete and total failure. Americans would try again. They wanted "Hope & Change" and would elect Obama next. But Obama (with his Nobel Peace Prize in hand) would end up dropping more bombs around the world than Bush! Americans would try again. Still wanting to end the madness, America would next turn to Donald Trump. In his inauguration speech, Trump said: We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world, but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first. Once again, we're a few years in, and it's almost impossible to believe that those words were actually spoken by Donald Trump! Donald Trump, like Bush before him, would honeycomb his administration with war-hungry and world hegemony-seeking neocons. Just yesterday, Patrick Buchanan wrote (emphasis added): For a president who won his office by denouncing the Middle East wars into which George W. Bush and Barack Obama plunged the nation, Donald Trump has assembled the most unabashedly hawkish conclave of foreign policy advisers in memory. And he himself seems to concede the point. This is not what Americans want, and not what Americans have voted for over the last 20+ years.
Do you think the neocons care about what the American people want?
A determined father was not about to give up trying to find out how his entire family plus four cousins were killed one morning last fall. The US denied conducting any raids in the area. Then the bomb fragments were found. How many times has this tragedy been repeated in the futile 18 year war? To what end?
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