Month: March 2016

I’m a slow learner. It took me 80 years to learn about the Kellogg-Briand Pact and another five to visit this wonderful Antiwar.com site. But here I am with an observation and an opportunity. Antiwar activists do not realize the potential of the Kellogg-Briand Pact to change the deep-seated war culture of America. It’s a simple fact that the law is on our side but (virtually) nobody knows it exists.

Ever since Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Kathy Kelly handed me David Swanson’s book, When the World Outlawed War, I’ve been intrigued by the efforts of small groups of peace activists all over the world to demand that their leaders sign and ratify this treaty. Now 62 counties have outlawed war and the threat of war as an instrument of policy. But obviously it had little effect. Why?

Most people are totally unaware of the law against war. Who’s responsible for that? I’ll return to this question later.

Continue reading “Learn the Law Against War and Win $1,000”

No sooner had the smoke cleared in Brussels than the security “experts” began telling the Europeans they must sacrifice more of their liberty for the promise that their governments would keep them safe. Never mind that the big lesson from Brussels is that their governments have not kept them safe, the answer is always to do more of what clearly is not working. Those are the “experts” and the Europeans will probably listen to them. But what if there is another way? What if something could be done differently that would not promise a perfect world, but might deliver a better one? We discuss that possibility in today’s Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

There’s an oversimplified narrative that’s really taken hold of late.

"Islam is to blame for terrorism. Why, have you read their holy book? They’re just doing what the Koran tells them."

There are three problems with this line of thought…

1. It’s not useful or valuable information. Even if it were true, what would it mean? Must one billion Muslims, the world over, be exterminated?
2. It’s not true. There’s the sticky problem that, unlike car accidents, terrorist attacks in places like Belgium, Paris, and San Bernardino are rare enough to be news. If it was the religion, and there are a billion adherents to it, these attacks should be more frequent than car accidents.
3. The claim is too broad to offer useful information. There are different sects of Islam, just as there different sects of most anything that has more than a couple-dozen followers. There are fundamentalist fire-breathing Wahhabis, flower-child Sufis, and everything in between. Is it really Islam that’s the problem? Once again, with a billion Muslims, why aren’t there far more attacks?

Know Your Enemy

It should first be pointed out that, most people who claim that Islam is inherently terroristic haven’t actually read Islam’s scriptures holy books (the Koran and Hadith). Instead, they read excerpts presented by others and shaped by their commentary.

Continue reading “Is Islam To Blame for Terrorism?”

I was disturbed to learn of the recent mass killing by the US government of yet another group of brown-skinned persons of unknown identity, this time in Yemen. Only two weeks ago, reports surfaced of a mission in Somalia which culminated in the deaths of an estimated 150+ terrorist suspects. The victims in Yemen, as is customary, were identified post-mortem as persons all of whom posed an “imminent threat” to US forces and allies. The estimated number of deaths in Yemen from the attack on Tuesday, March 22, 2016, is more than 50, with nearly as many people harmed. None of the dead were civilians, according to US officials.

“None of the dead were civilians” is a claim frequently made by drone program administrators, including John Brennan, who while serving as Obama’s top counterterrorism advisor announced in 2011 in apparent sincerity that there had been no collateral deaths from the CIA’s targeted killing program during the previous year. Later it emerged that the administration had simply redefined the concept of “civilian” so as to exclude male persons from about 16 to 50 or 55 years of age. That’s right: in one of the worst examples of racial profiling in human history, able-bodied males in tribal regions are assumed to be terrorists until proven otherwise.

Continue reading “Another Mass Killing in Yemen and the Drone Program Ponzi Scheme”

To those living “outside the Beltway” it may seem counterintuitive that those of us whose analysis has been correct on key issues that the U.S. government got criminally wrong – like the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – would be blacklisted from “mainstream” media and ostracized by the Smart People of the Establishment. But, alas, that’s the way it is.

Forget the continuing carnage in which hundreds of thousands have been killed and millions made refugees. Within the mainstream U.S. media and around Washington’s major policy circles, there is little serious dialogue, much less debate about what went so hideously wrong; and Americans still innocently wonder – regarding the people on the receiving end of the blunderbuss violence – “why they hate us.”

After more than 13 years of presenting thoughtful critiques to senior officials – and having little discernible impact – we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity are strongly tempted to take some solace in having made a good-faith effort to spread some truth around – and, now, go play golf. But the stakes are too high. We can’t in good conscience approach the first tee without having tried one more time.

Continue reading “US Intel Vets Warn Against Torture”

What does today’s bombing in Brussels have to do with ISIS in Iraq? Both feed the usual calls for military escalation in response to a problem created by military escalation in the first place. If ISIS is in Iraq as a result of the ill-fated 2003 US military action in Iraq, how can more military action in Iraq solve the problem? Likewise, if Europe’s slavish adherence to the Washington-led interventionist foreign policy line has resulted in blowback attacks, how does signing on to more of what the Beltway neocons have to offer going to remedy the problem? Perhaps, strangely enough, we can learn from what President Reagan did in a similar situation…

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.