It’s been 15 years since they lied us into Iraq War II.
So I did a couple of long, in-depth interviews with Jonathan Schwarz about how and why they lied us into it, and Gareth Porter about how the war played out.
Especially for those of you who were too young or wrong back then to know about it, I hope it’s helpful.
Back in 2009, I wrote a few articles on torture during the Bush/Cheney administration. With Barack Obama elected on a vague platform of hope, change, and transparency, there was a sense torture would be outlawed and torturers would be called to account. Obama did sign an executive order to outlaw torture – which really meant nothing more than that the U.S. would abide by international treaties and follow international law with respect to torture – but torturers were never called to account. The failure to do so has left us with a new president, Donald Trump, who says he supports torture (though his Defense Secretary, James Mattis, does not), and a person nominated to head the CIA who enabled torture and helped to cover it up.
Here are a few points I made back in 2009. We should consider these as Congress debates whether to place the CIA in the hands of a torturer.
We are facing a presidential “war cabinet” more aggressive than any in history. John Bolton, “Mad Dog” Mattis, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, “Bloody” Gina Haspel, and more. If we are not able to turn this ship around and return to a non-interventionist foreign policy, we may soon find that there is nothing left to preserve or conserve. What is one of the single most important and most effective ways of challenging the warfare state and its seeming monopoly over the mainstream media? It’s actually quite easy: we can get together, discuss, join forces, listen to speakers, network. As Jacob Hornberger says in today’s Liberty Report, that is the one action that totalitarian countries will NOT tolerate: allowing the dissenters to gather peacefully and oppose their policies. So let’s do just that next month at our South Carolina conference! – while we still can! Tune in to today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
President Trump has nominated Gina Haspel to be the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Haspel had an important role in the torture regimen approved by the Bush/Cheney administration, and she worked to destroy videotaped evidence of the same. What does it say about the United States that Haspel is now being rewarded both for enabling torture and for covering it up?
As Peter Van Buren writes at We Meant Well, “Unless our Congress awakens to confront the nightmare and deny Gina Haspel’s nomination as Director of the CIA, torture has already transformed us and so will consume us. Gina Haspel is a torturer. We are torturers. It is as if Nuremberg never happened.”
Continue reading “William J. Astore on Gina Haspel: A Torturer at the CIA”
President Trump’s huge military spending increase is based on a false premise: that more money means more security. If anything, the debacle of the F-35 fighter should demonstrate that massive military spending with no real purpose not only does not deliver more security but in fact undermines our security. A bigger military budget does not make us safer. It makes defense contractors and the revolving-door Pentagon officials much richer while emboldening the kinds of interventionist foreign policy that actually makes us more hated and thus vulnerable to attack. More in today’s Liberty Report:
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
Originally appeared on The American Conservative February 28, 2018.
Former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz spells out what the nuclear deal with Iran does and what withdrawing from it would mean:
Conversely, if Trump withdraws the United States from the agreement, with Iran complying and with our allies clearly committed to its continuation, he will have compromised the most stringent nuclear verification standard ever achieved, with no credible prospect for restoring or improving it [bold mine-DL]. Such a move would hand Iran a political “wedge” dividing the international community, and undercut vital arguments for verification of any agreement reached with North Korea.
Opponents of the deal often claim to be against it because it isn’t “tough” enough, but as Moniz explains the deal contains the “most robust verification measures the world has ever known.” Withdrawing from the deal means throwing that away for no good reason. If Trump follows through on his threat to withdraw, he will confirm that his complaints about the agreement were made in bad faith. Reneging on the deal just because some of its restrictions expire after a decade or more gives the game away. It gives Iran the excuse to ignore some or all of the deal’s restrictions immediately instead of having some of them lifted in the 2020s or 2030s. We’re supposed to believe that the gradual expiration of some restrictions is so intolerable that we should throw away all of the restrictions right away. It’s a completely irrational position, and so it’s obviously just a bad excuse for killing an agreement that Iran hawks never wanted.
Continue reading “The Consequences of Blowing Up the Nuclear Deal”
