Month: January 2016

What did you get for Christmas these last six years?

The U.S. government was nice enough to gift our loyal friends the Afghans $17 billion of your tax money, and, in the true spirit of giving, asked nothing in return for itself.

What that means in actual dollars and nonsense is that the U.S. government wasted $17 billion in taxpayer money in Afghanistan on various projects that never made it off the ground or were doomed to fail because of incompetence or lack of maintenance, according to a new report.

ProPublica looked at over 200 audits conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) over the last six years and tallied up the costs for the wide range of failed efforts to reach the $17 billion price tag. This greatest hits study only scratched the surface of the estimated $110 billion spent to rebuild the country (the U.S. spent some $47 billion in rebuilding Iraq, and how’d that work out?)

Continue reading “Six Years and $17 Billion Wasted in Afghanistan”

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.

The so-called Gitmo Periodic Review Board heard the case of Mustafa al Shamiri, 37. Intelligence analysts, I’ll say it again, 13 years ago, wrongly labeled him as a high level al-Qaida guy, because his name was similar to actual extremists. For 13 years of hell, like some modern-day Jean Valjean, he was known only as Detainee 434 by his American jailers.

“In making this determination, the board noted that the most derogatory prior assessments regarding the detainee’s activities before detention have been discredited, and the current information shows that the detainee has low-level military capability.”

Continue reading “Guantánamo Parole Board Clears Victim of Mistaken Identity – After 13 Years”

…that works out to about 28 dead every day.

It is also an estimate, given that many areas of the country are not readily accessible, and because the death toll from the siege of Ramadi is not accounted for in the figures. More than 3.2 million Iraqis are internally displaced and/or homeless.

Iraq is now an ungoverned, failed state, a killing field on the scale of genocide.

At least 18,802 civilians were killed and 36,245 wounded in Iraq over the last 22 months, according to the UN’s Report on the Protection of Civilians in the Armed Conflict in Iraq. Another 3,206,736 Iraqis are internally displaced, including more than one million children. The study emphasizes that these are conservative estimates. The UN also is careful to note that the number of civilians killed by secondary effects of the violence, such as lack of access to food, water or medical care, is unknown. In many areas of Iraq schools are closed and basic infrastructure is not functioning.

All that is in addition to the more than one million people already killed during the American occupation period.

Continue reading “Freedom! 19,000 Iraqi Civilians Killed in Less Than Two Years”

The US Senate under Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is poised to rush to the floor a bill that would give the president total war authority anywhere on the globe, perhaps even including on US soil. All in the name of fighting ISIS, Congress is about to crown the president with unlimited war powers. In today’s Liberty Report we discuss the dangers of the incredible shrinking Legislative branch of government:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

Most normal people look at the smoldering cemetery that is post-“liberation” Libya, the gruesome graveyard of an almost-“liberated” Syria, the 14 year slow-motion failed regime change in Afghanistan, blood-drenched Iraq, and they are horrified. Washington Post’s neocon nag Jennifer Rubin looks across that bloody landscape and sees a beautiful work in progress.

She writes today in the online edition of the Post that despite what we might be hearing from some “libertarian/populist pols masquerading as conservatives,” the interventionist enterprise is chugging alone just fine. Democracy promotion at the barrel of a gun is every American’s “white man’s burden” whether he likes it or not.

Never mind that Syria has been nearly leveled by almost five years of an Islamist insurgency that was but a few weeks from success when Russia stopped it in its tracks. The real villain is the secular Bashar al-Assad, writes Rubin. After all, he “is partnered with Iran and spurs support for Islamist rebels…”

Assad “spur[s] support for Islamist rebels” by waging war on them for six years? Or does she somehow deny that Assad is fighting the insurgents who seek to drive him from power? Both cannot be true.

Continue reading “WaPo’s Jennifer Rubin: More Regime Change, Please!”

The long red carpet is being rolled out from Tehran, and we should all hope that what strolls out is copious amounts of pistachios, fancy rugs, and caviar. And oil… oh boy the oil! Yes, the big Iran Deal appears to have been pulled off, and like a man walking out into the sunlight after being in a pitch-black room for a few days, there is some heavy blinking going on. Freedom can be really exciting at first. For those of us who are “Non-Aggression Principle” libertarians, we applaud. When the principles of liberty gain some ground, we find the urge to dance, even when it’s in the middle of a terrible republic in the Middle East.

Unfortunately, U.S. neoconservatives aren’t so happy, and one has to wonder why. I know it sounds absurd to say that because we do know why the neocons aren’t happy about the Deal, but we ought to step back and look at the field, as it were, because this is really remarkable. The neocons are supposedly the freedom fighters of the world, and will use any means available to shove democracy down anybody’s throat. War is perhaps their favorite means, and any formal Just War Theory is replaced with a nebulous strategy of trying to out-guess Russia or protect Zionist interests. There could be other examples, but the bottom line is that these strategies are cooked up in that revolving door that connects the White House, Wall Street, and the military industries. These strategies are defended by appealing to freedom-minded ideas, and it is the countries that we occupy, invade, bomb, etc. that are the unfortunate pawns.

Continue reading “How the Iran Deal Highlights Partisan Politics and Neocon Lies”