Month: June 2014

After five years of captivity in Afghanistan, has Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl been released only to spend the rest of his life in an American prison? Ron Paul wonders what it would be like if we had non-interventionist foreign policy. We haven’t had a Constitutional declaration of war since World War II. What if we had had no wars since then? Not only would it have saved countless lives in this war and those before it, but Americans prosperity would be intact. We wouldn’t have a VA health care crisis, since there would be so few veterans in need of attention. And some of the most warlike of cable TV’s talking heads would have nothing to talk about. Charles Goyette talks with Ron Paul on their Weekly Podcast about the strange case of Bowe Bergdahl.

Download MP3 here.

Charles Goyette is New York Times Bestselling Author of The Dollar Meltdown and Red and Blue and Broke All Over: Restoring America’s Free Economy. Check out Goyette and Paul’s national radio commentary: Ron Paul’s America and the Ron Paul and Charles Goyette Weekly Podcast. Goyette also edits The Freedom and Prosperity Letter.

“Assad’s days are numbered” – President Obama, February 2012

Living in denial is the easiest way to avoid hard truths, but it’s a horrible way for a government to conduct foreign policy. Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry recently scoffed at the elections in Syria, calling them “meaningless.” The U.S. media obediently agreed, while the rest of the world drew a much more realistic opinion. It’s true that an election during an ongoing conflict isn’t ideal for democracy, but the deeper truths exposed by the election were completely ignored by the US government and media.

Interestingly, few governments or media outlets doubted the Syrian election was fair for those who were able to vote. There were no large-scale allegations of fraud, and the numbers announced by the government were not seriously contested.

The results of the election weren’t a surprise to anyone familiar with Syrian domestic politics. Russian Television points out the two most obvious reasons Assad’s victory was assured:

1) The president never lost the support of his core constituencies – the Syrian armed forces, the government and business elite, the major cities, the minorities (Christians, Druze, Alawites, Shia, etc.) and secular Sunni (most of the 3 million members of the Baath Party are Sunni).

2) The opposition was fundamentally unable to present a cohesive front and a common political platform – this includes both domestic and external opponents – let alone rally behind a single candidate.

While ignoring these clear truths, John Kerry attempted to justify his characterization of the election as “meaningless,” by adding “…you can’t have an election where millions of your people don’t even have an ability to vote.”

Kerry’s point, although true, would hold greater weight if not for the fact that the Syrian Government controls all but one major city in Syria. Most of the Syrian rebel strength is in the less populated rural areas.

Therefore, it’s quite meaningful that 73 percent of eligible voters went to the polls and that 88 percent of them voted for Assad. Eleven out of 15 million apparently voted. And although one could likely poke further holes in the electoral process, the general sentiment in Syria found expression, the meaning of which was accepted by most of the world.

Continue reading “Obama’s Syrian Policy Vetoed by Assad Election Victory”

Blowing the whistle on wrongdoing creates a moral frequency that vast numbers of people are eager to hear. We don’t want our lives, communities, country and world continually damaged by the deadening silences of fear and conformity.

I’ve met many whistleblowers over the years, and they’ve been extraordinarily ordinary. None were applying for halos or sainthood. All experienced anguish before deciding that continuous inaction had a price that was too high. All suffered negative consequences as well as relief after they spoke up and took action. All made the world better with their courage.

Whistleblowers don’t sign up to be whistleblowers. Almost always, they begin their work as true believers in the system that conscience later compels them to challenge.

“It took years of involvement with a mendacious war policy, evidence of which was apparent to me as early as 2003, before I found the courage to follow my conscience,” Matthew Hoh recalled this week. “It is not an easy or light decision for anyone to make, but we need members of our military, development, diplomatic and intelligence community to speak out if we are ever to have a just and sound foreign policy.”

Hoh describes his record this way: “After over 11 continuous years of service with the U.S. military and U.S. government, nearly six of those years overseas, including service in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as positions within the Secretary of the Navy’s Office as a White House Liaison, and as a consultant for the State Department’s Iraq Desk, I resigned from my position with the State Department in Afghanistan in protest of the escalation of war in 2009.”

Continue reading “Memo to Potential Whistleblowers: If You See Something, Say Something”

The Obama administration deserves much of the blame for the failure of the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

It had originally been hoped that the United States would present a binding framework along the lines of what moderate Israeli and Palestinian political leaders had agreed to in unofficial talks in Geneva in 2003: Israel would recognize a Palestinian state based roughly on the pre-1967 borders with mutual territorial swaps, which would leave the Palestinians with 22 percent of historic Palestine and allow Israel to keep the remaining 78 percent; the Palestinian state would be demilitarized and all irregular militias disarmed; illegal settlements in occupied Palestinian territory near the Israeli border – encompassing close to 80 percent of the settlers – would be incorporated into Israel while settlers in the more remote settlements would be required to return to Israel; there would be no right of return for Palestinian refugees to Israel, but there would be international assistance in helping them resettle in the new Palestinian state; and some Israeli troops would remain along border crossings between the Palestinian state and its Arab neighbors, eventually to be replaced by international forces.

The Palestinian government agreed to these terms. Israel rejected them. Rather than make public this framework, and thereby hope the Israeli public would pressure its right-wing government to compromise, the Obama administration instead insisted that “both sides” had shown a lack of will to compromise.

An interview with an anonymous U.S. official close to the peace talks in an Israeli publication confirmed numerous other reports that, despite the Obama administration’s claims to the contrary, the Palestinian side made major concessions while the Israeli side essentially refused to make any, generally refusing to talk about any substantive issues.

A host of Democratic and Republican former officials – including a former national security adviser, secretary of defense, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, trade representative, and undersecretary of state for political affairs – went on record arguing that the Obama administration would have to challenge the Israeli government’s hard line towards the Palestinians in order for the peace process to be successful. Unfortunately, the White House apparently had no interest in doing so.

Continue reading “US Culpability in the Failure of Israeli-Palestinian Peace Talks”

A new organization for whistleblowing will launch on Wednesday morning when the ExposeFacts.org website goes live and the group begins its first day with a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington.

NSA whistleblowers William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe will speak at the news conference along with EPA whistleblower Marsha Coleman-Adebayo and journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, a member of the ExposeFacts editorial board.

Continue reading “Daniel Ellsberg: New Group to Clear a Path for More Whistleblowers”

On this day 150 years ago, General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had their last great victory over the Army of Potomac.   General Grant was convinced that the Southerners were whupped and that he merely had to attack a few more times and Lee’s forces would surrender or dissolve.   Lee outfoxed Grant again and his troops were well-entrenched at Cold Harbor.  Grant’s officers did zero reconnaissance and the northern troops charged into a hellfire in which up to 7000 soldiers were cut down in the first quarter hour.  Grant compounded the damage to his troops by refusing to admit he had been beaten; he dithered with messages to Lee that meant that the wounded Yankees lay in the hot sun for several days before they were retrieved.  By that point, most of the wounded were dead.

Grant lied to the War Office about the carnage his army had suffered.  As Historynet.com noted, “Grant’s initial report to General Halleck, sent at 2 p.m., was shocking in its understatement. He reported, ‘Our loss was not severe, nor do I suppose the enemy to have lost heavily.'” Grant’ss coverup was assisted by top officials in the Lincoln administration.  The Republican Party was having their convention a few days later and it would have not helped Lincoln’s reelection campaign to publicly admit that the Army of the Potomac had had its worst bludgeoning since the 1862 battle of Fredericksburg.

As a 1997 article in Civil War Times noted:

Occurring when it did, the Battle of Cold Harbor could have caused dissension at the Republican convention in Baltimore, threatening the renomination of Lincoln or at least marring the appearance of almost universal Union support for his second term. It certainly would have brought a tremendous outcry from the Democratic press, triggering an increase in the activities of subversive Peace Democrat, or Copperhead, societies and Confederate agents in Canada. And it would have enhanced support for the already substantial peace movement in the North. If the Northern public had learned of the disastrous charge and the tragic neglect of the wounded soldiers, Lincoln and Grant might have lost their jobs after the election.

The Battle of Cold Harbor was the type of incident for which the Democratic press had waited for three years. This was particularly true of Copperhead newspapers, which relished occasions to castigate Lincoln and his administration. In June 1864 they bungled their biggest opportunity.

Union Col. Joshua Chamberlain, one of the heroes of Gettysburg, later wrote, “We were not called upon or permitted to report our casualties during that whole campaign from the Rapidan to the Rappahannock to the James and Appomattox, for fear the country could not stand the disclosure.”

Abraham Lincoln is deified by most historians for his exaltation in the Gettysburg Address about “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”  But Lincoln, like many subsequent presidents (including Obama), was careful not to muddy self-government by permitting citizens to know the full extents of the debacles that their government committed in their name.

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