Fixing The Intelligence Around The Policy...In Syria
US Central Command intelligence analysts claim the military has punished them for coming to conclusions at odds with Pentagon leadership over the viability of US-backed rebel groups in Syria. Are we seeing the Iraq fiasco all over again?
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
US Central Command intelligence analysts claim the military has punished them for coming to conclusions at odds with Pentagon leadership over the viability of US-backed rebel groups in Syria. Are we seeing the Iraq fiasco all over again?
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
US Central Command intelligence analysts claim the military has punished them for coming to conclusions at odds with Pentagon leadership over the viability of US-backed rebel groups in Syria. Are we seeing the Iraq fiasco all over again?
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Hello everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
Today with me is Daniel McAdams, the co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
Good.
I want to talk to you with my audience today a little bit about what's going on in Syria.
It's still a place that's drawing attention.
It's still a mess.
But this has to do with management of it.
You know, we've complained a lot about getting accurate information.
That was the toughest job in the world to get accurate information in Washington.
I even would refuse to go to top secret briefings because that's the last thing they would tell you is the truth.
And then when the history came out about what was going on leading up to the Iraq war, we found out that there were directions, literally directions, evidence to show that the analysts were instructed when they did these intelligence reports to adapt the intelligence report to the policy, not to the facts, but to the policy.
Well, can you believe it?
It looks like that is exactly what is going on in Syria.
And maybe these guys that are adapting it are taking their orders from John McCain.
And if they are, they're not going to get the right information.
But the worst part is, are the people who are exposing this and telling us and telling the American people, guess what?
They're not being treated very well.
And, you know, truth can be treason in an empire.
And this is evidently the way they're treating him.
Not that they've been charged with treason or anything, but they're not being treated well.
They're not going to get a promotion.
So do you think this is exactly what went on in Iraq?
Are these the same clowns running thing?
Or is it just embedded in our system that they expect that they're allowed to lie and that the people will continue to believe everything the government tells them?
Well, when you stake everything on the idea of interventionism, yet the intervention goes wrong, you have to sort of fidget with things to make it look better.
But, you know, this story has been bubbling along for quite a few months now.
Sometimes it pops above the surface, other times it doesn't.
The mainstream media seems relatively uninterested in it.
I wonder why.
And this is actually this article that we both saw the other day was in the Daily Beast, which is not a website we normally look at with a lot of enthusiasm because it's usually pretty pro-war and pro-neocon.
But the point is that there are these analysts for the U.S. Central Command, CENTCOM, who are looking at the train and equip, the Pentagon's train and equip program for rebels being trained and then sent into Syria to fight ISIS, but really to also overthrow the Assad government.
And the analysts were seeing something very, very different than the very politicized military brass.
And so that's where you have the problem because the analysts weren't seeing how it was supposed to be.
They're seeing how it really was.
You know, I think about history of the people needing to have information versus what the government does.
It goes way back, even before the Magna Carta.
It goes back to even to the Hammurabi Code, that the government was not allowed to do things the people weren't allowed to do.
You know, even the Bastiat principle was known for a long time, and this has been competition endlessly.
But you have heard stories about what happens to an individual if they're being interrogated by the FBI.
Of course, there's no justification for flat-out lying, but I tell you what, you don't lie to the FBI.
I mean, that is something else.
But if we can't lie to the government, and we can't lie to our neighbors, and there's a responsibility because of the morality of it all, Why is it that we allow on our governments to continue to do this?
Evidently, this has existed for centuries, if not thousands of years, of always the government lying to the people.
And once again, here it is, they're telling us stories about what's going on really in Syria.
It's not true at all, and trying to promote the propaganda.
And I think that's our biggest threat today is the power of the propaganda machine.
And this is part of it.
They take a report and they slant it in different ways.
And then all of a sudden it ends up with their friends on the news media and then their friends in Congress.
And before you know it, to counteract that is just very, very difficult.
But if we're looking for a little bit of hope, you know, more people than ever don't believe our government.
What is about 70 or 80 percent now say they don't even believe what the government say?
I think that's healthy.
Yeah, that is.
You know, as you point out, I mean, if you lie to the FBI, even about a relatively trivial matter, you will usually be charged more for the lying than for the actual crime.
But if you look at something like Libya, where the stakes are so many orders of magnitude higher, you're talking about, first of all, a conflict in Syria that's taken a quarter of a million lives at least.
That's significant.
But you're also talking about a U.S. policy that spent $500 million, half a billion dollars.
They promised that they would train 5,000 rebels to go into Syria and fight this war on behalf of U.S. policy.
They got five instead of 5,000.
Why NATO Went Bad00:05:14
So $500 million for five rebels.
And the people that are warning them saying this is not working out very well, they're being told, shut up.
Well, why hasn't the multilateralists been able to stop this?
You know, do they compound it?
I mean, we have NATO.
Aren't they the superior people of the world and they're going to manage all wars?
They don't seem to help.
It seems like they make use of the people who are promoting the wars.
And occasionally we can find an article that challenges the NATO.
But we had a recent anniversary for NATO.
Yeah, NATO turned 67 yesterday.
And it's an organization that was founded to stop the Soviet land invasion of Western Europe.
That obviously never took place and most likely will not take place now because there is no Soviet Union.
So NATO outlived its usefulness by decades.
In 91, when it was clear that the Cold War was well and truly over, NATO scrambled for a new mission.
And the new mission was, and actually Max Boot had it, Max Boot is a big neoconservative writer.
He had a piece in commentary yesterday, and he was arguing for NATO.
It's wonderfully useful.
We've got to keep it up.
And here's one of his justifications.
NATO provides a forum outside the UN that can legitimate American-led military interventions.
Right.
So that says it all.
You know, NATO was set up to worry about the Soviets.
We don't have the Soviets, but we have those Russians now.
And the Russians are very, very aggressive.
So they actually look at their borders, and they haven't invaded the Western Hemisphere yet.
But we did a program on the fact that the troops are being sent back there.
That's a NATO function, isn't it?
Don't they agree with sending more troops into Eastern Europe?
So NATO, but they said it's Russian aggression, Russian aggression.
And there, once again, it's back to the propaganda, and people will be saying, well, they said Russian aggression, we've got to stop them.
They're bad people.
And of course, I see the same type of propaganda being built up in Syria.
It was in Afghanistan.
It was in Libya.
You know, there's always bad things happening in Iraq.
So it's always getting the people's fears built up.
And now people are terrified of ISIS.
Well, we should be concerned, but we ought to stop and ask who are they and where they get their weapons and what are their motives.
But they never ask that.
Oh, yeah, they're coming over here because they don't like us to be free people and they don't like our prosperity, which is nothing more than government lies.
Yeah, well, you know, as Max Boot points out in this article, and it's very interesting, he said if NATO were a country, it would have the second largest military budget in the world, right after the U.S.
They spend some $600 billion a year on NATO's defense.
His argument, of course, is that the Europeans have got to pony up a lot more money for a much bigger NATO.
But, you know, the idea that in 2016 the Russians are going to start a land invasion, why do they want the Baltics?
They're going to take the Baltics and they're going to march on Paris.
It's so absurd on its face.
You wonder how people can be propagandized into believing such a foolish...
What would they do with it?
What if they overran it?
I thought from the beginning when we started stirring up trouble with the Russians over Ukraine and Crimea that it wouldn't happen, it wouldn't get bad.
It hasn't got dramatically worse, but it's still floating out there.
And I thought that the trade element would overwhelm.
But I think the trade is still important if we looked at it more objectively.
It would say, you know, the Russians have more to lose than to gain to go in there because they want customers now.
You know, that's what they're interested in.
So I would think that if we looked at that more objectively, we wouldn't be describing Russians as the aggressors.
We have to get NATO and get authority to NATO and build up more lives and say they're about to march in.
And the one group that benefits the most is when you expand militarism around the world, they're always our weapons.
And guess what?
Most of them are made in the United States.
That's one thing that we build and we do export.
We export the weapons.
I'd like to see us be a country that could set a good standard for policy, economic policy, and monetary policy, and voluntarily, from this example, teach other people.
That should be our export.
You know, the love of liberty and the understanding of liberty.
That to me would be a worthwhile export, but not guns and bombs and cruise missiles and all this.
What a tragedy.
You know, there's another writer who I enjoy, Danielle Ryan, and she wrote another piece on NATO's birthday the same day, and I like her title much better.
Happy birthday, NATO.
It's time to retire.
NATO at 67 can collect a Social Security.
But in it, and I know you'll appreciate this, she quoted Senator Robert Taft around the time that they were creating NATO.
Mr. Republican's Concerns00:07:12
As you know, Mr. Republican was opposed to it, and he had a couple of good points.
He said that NATO is not a peace program, it's a war program, which is good.
And he also said, how would we feel if Russia undertook to arm a country on our border, Mexico, for instance?
Right, right.
All those years ago, and it just sounds like today.
But, you know, I used Robert Taft in the debates because they said, I'm not a Republican.
You know, maybe they didn't have Republican viewpoints.
But Mr. Republican took this position.
They have a statute you can see from the Senate chambers.
You can look down over the hill and there's a statute for Robert Taft.
But he was not exactly as non-interventionist as we would like to be, but I think if progress could be made to defend and understand moving in a certain direction, and I want to move in the direction of non-intervention.
But he's not considered a Republican.
So what do they do?
They ridicule an individual that would talk about non-intervention.
And it was a Republican position at one time.
But now, if you're not strong supporters of war, you're not considered Republican.
Look at the contest going on today.
See who can be the toughest and who would launch the bombs the quickest, you know, if there's any confrontation at all.
Yeah, exactly.
But, you know, going back to the Syria thing, you know, there are a couple of things that came to my mind.
First, this in a way is a contest between the competition between the Pentagon and the CIA.
The CIA goes over there and they can do business with anyone as dirty as they are.
As a matter of fact, the dirtier the better.
That's why they've been involved with NUSPA Front and all these groups.
The Pentagon is subject to a little bit more scrutiny, so they have to be more careful, but they also want to be just as effective because they want to be seen as equally effective.
But, you know, we know that this training program has been a disaster.
And I did a piece on the Institute side a few days ago that Obama, in the face of all this disaster, has decided to start up a new training program.
It's going to work this time, we're pretty sure.
But, you know, I was looking around yesterday for something we might put up on the Institute's website that would answer some of these questions better.
And you would not believe this, but I came across a speech you did in 2012.
And if they'd only listened to you, because this is when the U.S. was really starting to ramp up the covert program to supply the Syrians, the rebels going into Syria and weaponizing them and training them and everything.
And you went to the House floor, and I encourage our audience to go to the Ron Paul Institute website, ronpaulinstitute.org, and look at this.
But you went up there and you introduced legislation prohibiting the president from providing any military or paramilitary supplies to any rebels going into Syria.
It was an HR, so a force of law bill prohibiting this transfer.
And if they'd only listened to you back then, how many, seriously, how many lives might have been saved?
I don't think I had very many co-sponsors on that.
A couple of our usual friends.
Usual friends.
And as I recall, it was an empty, empty floor because it was a special order after the business is done.
So I didn't get any applause.
And I got booze when I was running for Congress for, I mean, running for the presidency when I spoke like this, that we ought to mind our own business.
But, you know, in time, I really believe if you're on the right track and you deal in principles and you basically understand them and believe they're the correct principles, long term, things will come out okay.
And the truth is, is when I first went to Congress, I expected to get a lot less attention than I got.
You know, I was amazed that over the years that people did pay more attention.
But I thought my job was just to set an example the best I could by voting the way the Constitution told me I had to vote and the oath that I took, and then develop these positions that explain non-intervention in personal liberties and non-intervention in economic policy and non-intervention overseas.
So I think long term, that'll play out and people will pay attention.
Like I say, I was surprised people paid some attention already.
But I think that we, as far as I'm concerned, we have to move in that direction if we want to live in a free country.
And I think what I observe now in this country, why everybody is so upset and so angry, and it's chaos in the political system, that it's ripe for an intellectual revolution.
And that, of course, is what we have talked about, and libertarians would like to see a freedom revolution where we concentrate on increasing liberty rather than having patchwork.
And whether it's foreign policy or economic policy or social policy, if you have a problem and you want to correct it, you create two new problems.
So that's why the Congressional Register is so big and continues to grow.
And then they try to manage the economy with the tax code.
I mean, what a mess.
So there's an awakening going on today.
I just wish there would be more people who would look at things more carefully and see that liberty is the answer and that it is not conceding anything to anybody.
Just because we don't want to confront the Russians right now, that doesn't mean that we condone what Russia does, you know, because they're going to have infraction.
We never condone everything the Chinese did and do now, yet we trade with them.
So it's hard for me to understand why there's so much inconsistency and willing to go along one time, but the next time they change their mind and won't do it.
And to me, it's a lot of demagoguery going on under those circumstances, and the people have to be deceived.
They have to be frightened.
And I think it's a worthy cause to, you know, be motivated to spread the word of liberty.
And that's what this country was supposed to have been about.
But quite frankly, the statistics aren't so good for us now.
We are not on the top of the list for economic liberty.
We're not on the top of the list even for social liberties.
And we certainly aren't even very high on being a non-interventionist.
As a matter of fact, we're at the bottom of that list because we have more troops in more countries than everybody else put together.
So it's time for us to have a revolutionary approach to this.
And revolutionary means it's going to be intellectual and it's going to be defined by individual liberty, which is quite a bit different than what is going on in this country today.
The people are fed up.
The system isn't working.
The economy is not going to do well.
And it's time for us to get this message out that true liberty can be our answer.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.