Month: April 2016

The scandal around the fixing of intelligence around the Pentagon training program for Syrian rebels has been on slow burn for some time. The mainstream media has largely avoided it, but when Pentagon superiors quash reports of intelligence analysts because they don’t match the desired outcome of the policy there is a big problem. Having spent $500 million to train rebels last year and only produced five fighters, there should be more scrutiny of this program, not less. More today in the Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

Evil is participatory, says interviewee David Harris at the beginning of a documentary in progress about Vietnam-era draft resisters, The Boys Who Said No!

Evil continuing depends on people joining in, and the first step to stopping it, he continues, is withdrawing your own participation. So Harris said no to the Vietnam-era draft, and went to jail for it.

The Boys Who Said No!

The Boys Who Said No! is set during the late 1960s and early 70s, when thousands resisted conscription at the risk of federal prison. Unlike those who evaded the draft by fleeing to Canada, getting various deferments, or resorting to violent protest, the subjects of this film chose civil disobedience.

It was a costly decision.

Continue reading “‘The Boys Who Said No!’: New Documentary About War Resisters”

You know the old saying: if at first you don’t succeed, keep trying the same dumb thing over and over and wonder why you are still not succeeding. Well, at least that’s the Beltway version of that old saying.

We know what happened last time the Pentagon launched a program to train rebels to fight ISIS (and overthrow Assad) in Syria: they spent half a billion dollars and ended up with five fighters.

What do they care, it’s only (our) money!

But the interventionists are never dissuaded by failure, so last month President Obama signed off on yet another Syria rebel training program. This time they decided the solution to the problem of most of their trained rebels either being killed by or going over to the side of al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and ISIS – and more than half of the US-supplied weapons going into the hands of al-Qaeda: instead of training rebels in groups, train rebel commanders one at a time in Turkey. Yes, that Turkey.

Continue reading “They’re at it Again: Pentagon Training New Syrian Rebels”

The next time a candidate or reporter asks during a debate about education or healthcare “But how are you going to pay for that?” I would like the person being questioned to respond “The same way we find money to pay for Iraq.”

So maybe it would just be better for Flint, Michigan to claim it is under attack by ISIS instead of just being poisoned because no one has the money to fix America’s infrastructure.

See, each month, Iraq’s government pays out nearly $4 billion in salaries and pensions to the military and a bloated array of corrupt public-sector workers. But with more than 90 percent of government revenue coming from oil, it is bringing in only about half that as crude prices plunge. Some Iraqi officials and analysts say the government might struggle later this year to pay the seven million people on the public payroll, which could trigger mass unrest.

Continue reading “Iraq Is Broke. You Have To Pay for It.”

“Israel’s Influence: Good or Bad for America?” was the theme of a daylong conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on March 18, 2016.

The Conference archive is available on YouTube below:

Speakers included Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo, as well as Gideon Levy, Susan Abulhawa, Philip Weiss, Rula Jebreal, Huwaida Arraf, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Kirk James Beattie, Grant Smith Catherine Jordan, Maria LaHood, Roger J. Mattson, Tareq Radi, Janet McMahon, Delinda C. Hanley, and Dale Sprusansky.

“Israel’s Influence” is co-sponsored by the American Educational Trust, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep). Attendees receive lunch and an invitation to a special attendee-speaker reception.

Continue reading “Conference Video: Israel’s Influence: Good or Bad for America?”

US backing for the overthrow of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was supposed to be all about democracy. As Washington tells it, the people took to the street demanding democratic reforms and Assad did not listen, so he lost his legitimacy and needed to be overthrown. The US helped facilitate that overthrow by shipping in tons of weapons (much of which ended up in the hands of al-Qaeda and ISIS).

What Syrians were supposed to get in Assad’s place was a bright new future where they could vote for whoever they pleased to lead their government. That is what Washington told us was the noble goal of its regime change operation in Syria.

But just as in other US “democratization” operations overseas, that turns out to be not the case at all.

Syrians are free to choose their leaders as long as they choose the leaders Washington has chosen for them.

Continue reading “White House to Syrians: Don’t Dare Vote for Assad!”