Should we really be selling more weapons to Saudi Arabia? Why did the Obama Administration send weapons from Libya to rebels in Syria? Special Guest Senator Rand Paul joins the Liberty Report to let us know how he's fighting the mad interventionists in Washington.
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Should we really be selling more weapons to Saudi Arabia? Why did the Obama Administration send weapons from Libya to rebels in Syria? Special Guest Senator Rand Paul joins the Liberty Report to let us know how he's fighting the mad interventionists in Washington.
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
I have a very special guest with me today.
He happens to be a senator from Kentucky, and he happens to be my son, Senator Rand Paul.
Rand, good to see you today.
Glad to be here.
Glad you're in town.
We had a nice family reunion recently, and everybody was glad to see you.
So I had to put you to work a little bit here and find out what's going on in the Senate.
But you have a lot of things going on.
First thing off is that it's six years since I attended your swearing in.
And that means six years.
I think every six years you have to get re-elected.
So you're in the middle of a campaign right now.
We're hoping to get you back to Washington for another swearing in.
Although it seems to be hard to get you to Washington these days.
Well, the swearing in would be okay, but I thought you were going to say, get me back to Congress.
That's scary.
Yeah, no, I'm up for election.
And Kentucky's a state that's been trending Republican, but our registration is more Democrat than Republican.
And until recently, we've had mostly Democrat governors.
Our state house is still Democrat, but they're conservative Democrats and our voting for federal office has trended more Republican.
So we think we have a good chance of re-election.
My opponent is very wealthy and has put about a million of his own money in and probably will put several million in more.
So our main concern is just being prepared in case he puts a lot of his own money into the race.
Well, good.
I think most people are optimistic about it, but one thing for sure, you've been around politics for a while.
You can't take anything for granted.
And this year in particular, you know, ups and downs, there's no doubt about it.
Now, you've been there not quite six years yet, but you're on three subcommittees, three committees.
And the one committee, which was similar to the one I was on, is Foreign Affairs.
You call it Foreign Relations.
And you got on that rather quickly.
It took me so long to get on that committee.
So do you find that one of your more interesting committees to be working on?
Yeah, and it took me a little bit of work to get on it.
And I got on it, I think, after I'd been there two years.
But one of the interesting things is that I've tried to use it to discuss issues of whether we should be at war or not.
So about two years ago, they were discussing a water bill for Africa that they were going to give money to Africa.
And they've been working on it for seven years.
And I was the only thing stopping it.
And I decided that I would amend it with an authorization to use force or to not use force in the Middle East.
So we actually had a discussion on it.
And I ended up voting against the authorizations, actually, that both sides put forward.
The Republicans wanted an authorization that would allow them to go to war in any country around the world, anytime, if there was a vague link to ISIS.
And then the Democrats put forward one that would have to be renewed every three years, but had no geographic limit, so it could have been still war.
And right now, there are 30 some odd countries that pledge allegiance to ISIS.
And I just don't see a war that has no geographic limit and an ill-defined enemy that anytime a terrorist group pops up and says we're part of ISIS, we would then be at war with that country.
I think that is too much power given up to the presidency.
You know, the two things that what you've been doing has called my attention, even though I don't see everything that you do, and I know you're real busy.
But one was the bit of confrontation, altercation with your friend Hillary.
Secretary Clinton, and I'm glad to see your health is improving.
One of the things that disappointed me most about the original 9-11 was no one was fired.
We spent trillions of dollars, but there were a lot of human errors.
These are judgment errors, and the people who make judgment errors need to be replaced, fired, and no longer in a position of making these judgment calls.
So we have a review board.
Review board finds 64 different things that we can change.
A lot of them are common sense and should be done, but the question is, it's a failure of leadership that they weren't done in advance, and four lives were cost because of this.
I'm glad that you're accepting responsibility.
I think that ultimately with your leaving, you accept the culpability for the worst tragedy since 9-11.
And I really mean that.
Had I been president at the time and I found that you did not read the cables from Benghazi, you did not read the cables from Ambassador Stevens, I would have relieved you of your post.
I think it's inexcusable.
The thing is, is that, you know, we can understand that you're not reading every cable.
I can understand that maybe you're not aware of the cable from the ambassador in Vienna that asked for $100,000 for an electrical charging station.
I can understand that maybe you're not aware that your department spent $100,000 on three comedians who went to India on a promotional tour called Make Chi Not War.
But I think you might be able to understand and might be aware of the $80 million spent on a consulate in Mashar al-Sharif that will never be built.
I think it's inexcusable that you did not know about this and that you did not read these cables.
I would think by anybody's estimation, Libya.
This was one thing that we still may be hearing more about because you were very blunt with her about, you know, weapons leaving Libya and ending up in Syria.
And I think you weren't making the claim as much as, what do you know about it?
And she was rather indignant that you would ask her that.
Well, she acted almost as if, oh, Senator, I've never heard of such a thing.
Even though it had been in the London Financial Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, that weapons were leaving Libya, going through Turkey and into Syria.
It's also well known, has been written about by many people in the just the lay press, that she was the biggest advocate of not only the bombing of Libya, but then the arming of the so-called moderate rebels in Syria.
This was all Hillary Clinton.
And so when I asked her, do you know anything about, was the CIA annex in any way involved with this?
And there's so much circumstantial information to think that they were.
There was a shipment in the mainstream press, a shipment that went through Turkey, and it was described as chaotic.
When they're unloading the weapons in Turkey, there's just people everywhere saying, oh, I like America.
Will you give me a shoulder-to-air missile?
And it's like, yeah, here's one.
But I think some of that was coming in the CIA annex had something to do with it.
Now, they maintain that the CIA Annex was collecting the loose weapons that got loose when they got rid of Gaddafi.
There were said to be 20,000 surface-to-air missiles, these man-pad missiles, that were missing.
So they said they were collecting them to get them out of the jihadist hands in Libya.
But I think they were taking them from one jiadis group and giving them to another jiadis group or one that was professing to be less of a jiadis group in Syria.
Well, there's hints now that your whole argument will be fortified if some of this information comes out from the emails, the Breitbart things.
And he's hinted that you were exactly right on those charges.
And I think we'll find out.
They're saying that in October more of these emails will be released.
I feel comfortable that she was dishonest, though, and that she lied to me.
She said she knew nothing about it.
The Secretary of State after her, Kerry, when we had discussions with him, and I can't tell you what the discussions were, but he was very aware of everything the CIA was doing in Syria.
There's no way the Secretary of State was not briefed on what the CIA annex was doing.
She said she had no knowledge.
That has to be a lie, that she had no knowledge of what the CIA was doing in Libya.
Plus, she's got, you know, the ambassador over there.
She had to have directed him.
Why was he there?
What was he doing in this war-torn area?
Maybe that was her last lie that she'll ever tell.
Who knows?
But there's another thing that has been in the news lately, and we've done some programs on this.
Saudi Arabia's Weapon Controversy00:09:00
We've been very fascinated with what's going on with Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
And there's weapons, there's a proposal over a billion dollars of weapons going to Saudi, and you have objected to this.
And I want you to explain to the audience, you know, how the technical advantage, this is something obviously wouldn't be available in the House, but you as a senator, by knowing the rules, you're able to at least call attention.
Hopefully you'd stop it, but at least the big thing is that you're going to be able to call attention to what's going on.
Well, I think when you look at the overall region, you know, there used to be sort of a balance of power between Iran and Iraq.
Then with the Iraq war and with the Iraqi government gone, and then with more allied with Iran now, there's a strengthening of Iran.
Iran has gotten more money because of the Iran deal recently.
And so Saudi Arabia looks at that and says, well, we want ours too.
And that Iran is now allowed to become stronger because of the releasing of this money to Iran.
So Saudi Arabia wants a billion.
But Saudi Arabia has actually gotten tens of billions of dollars of weapons under President Obama, more weapons under President Obama than any other president previously.
But we've discovered a law back from 1976 called the Arms Export Control Legislation or Act.
And under that, there's a provision that says that any senator can object to an arms sale and force a vote, up or down vote.
It's a privileged vote.
They can't stop me.
One senator by themselves can request or demand this vote and it will occur.
The other interesting thing we've discovered from the Arms Export Control Act is that it was written and it says in it explicitly, arms cannot be sold to countries unless it's for the legitimate self-defense of the country.
It's kind of hard to imagine how Saudi Arabia dropping bombs in a neighboring country has anything to do with the self-defense of Saudi Arabia.
So really, even under the terms of the Export Control Act, I think they're in violation of that.
That's one of the points I'll bring up is not only can I demand the vote, I think I have good evidence that they're in breach of the act, you know, in the actual essence of the act.
Does the law prescribe how much time will be spent or will the Senate leadership determine the debate time?
They determine probably the debate time, but I have to request it within a specific amount of days under which it's announced.
They're forced to come and tell us.
And one interesting thing we learned is when we got involved with this about six months ago with Pakistan, we learned that they were supposed to be telling us when the arms sales came up.
They were only informing the chairman of the committee and the ranking member.
They were not telling the rank and file members.
So now we've requested that they tell us anytime an arms sale is coming up.
And I think they're going to ultimately rue the day because I'm going to object to a lot of this because I think ultimately the arms technology belongs to the taxpayer.
We were all taxed to develop special tanks, special fighter planes, and they aren't simply a private business because we don't sell them obviously to our enemies.
I think we need to be concerned about selling them to people who might be our frenemies, who might sometimes be our enemy, but sometimes be also opposed to us.
Now, you did get the vote on the Pakistanis, and the vote was not overwhelmingly in favor of your position, but it was still...
We lost, but you can sometimes lose the battle but win the war.
We got a little over 20 votes, about half Republican, half Democrat.
We developed some allies.
Chris Murphy from Connecticut, Senator, who's a progressive Democrat, has allied with me on this.
And even though we lost the vote, we got about 22 votes or so, so they got 60 some odd votes and they won.
Even though we lost the vote, Senator Corker, who didn't vote with us, was also objecting to the subsidy.
The U.S. taxpayers are having to pay for these F-16s for Pakistan.
And in doing so, Pakistan eventually, after the vote, just said, oh, well, never mind.
So right now, we're not selling those planes to Pakistan.
We actually won the battle of the taxpayer not subsidizing.
Worthwhile.
A congressman, now a senator, somebody I think you work with, and I was just wondering where he comes down on some of these issues.
Ron Wyden, I've always found him to be a pretty honest, straightforward.
He's been good on all the privacy issues, like NSA and things like that.
We work together.
To tell you the truth, I'm not sure exactly where he is on this.
I can't remember how he voted.
But on this issue, it was more Chris Murphy's been taking the lead, and he's been very interested in Saudi Arabia.
So we're having discussion with his office.
I don't know if he'll support the resolution at this point, but I know he supports the concept that basically we become complicit in anything Saudi Arabia does if they're doing it with our weapons.
In fact, some of the tanks they want to get from this deal are tanks that are to replace tanks that they lost in Yemen already.
Now, you'll have this incident, you'll bring this up to get this vote.
Is there anything else, especially in foreign affairs, that you might be working on or anticipating, any piece of legislation that's going through that we should be keeping our eye on?
Well, one of the things your viewers can do is write to their senators on this vote, because this vote will occur, and they should call, harass, write, email their senators to say, why are you selling these weapons to Saudi Arabia?
And so I think that's of use.
I think that there's going to be more of this coming up because there's so many contradictions in the battle in the Middle East.
For example, this week we've discovered that Turkey now is rolling U.S.-made tanks into Syria.
But they're not attacking ISIS, the people we like the least over there.
They're actually attacking the Kurds who are also with our weapons.
So now we have U.S. tanks, M60 tanks, paid for probably by the Turks, but I mean, essentially made and subsidized by the U.S. taxpayer, are now fighting against weapons the Kurds have that were also given to them as well.
So we have weapons on both sides of battles now in Syria.
Yeah, that's awfully discouraging.
We've talked a whole lot on this program, you know, about Syria.
And I think we'll be talking about it for a long time, and you're going to be involved with it too.
But it's not very easy to get a consensus in the Congress to bring ourselves out.
And quite frankly, I haven't heard from the two major candidates right now running for the presidency talking about backing off at all.
You know, both say we have to rebuild our military.
I don't know.
In some ways, it's worse.
It's the worst case scenario because not being there would be one alternative.
All-in would be another alternative.
But what we're really doing is dripping soldiers in a little bit at a time, kind of reminiscent of the way we sort of got started in Vietnam in the beginning.
A little bit here, a little bit there.
Their advisors are not in a combat role.
But they're in the midst of this, and we've already lost at least one soldier over there in the most recent battles.
But putting a dozen people into battle and having our people call through three sets of lawyers to decide when they're allowed to bomb the enemy and not being clear who the enemy is because there are civilians everywhere is not a real good recipe for a victory or a recipe for, I think, or fair to our soldiers to put them in the middle of a situation where they have to call three levels of attorney to decide whether to fire their weapons.
We're going to have to go in a minute, too, but I wanted to bring up one other thing that you have brought up.
And you've been very supportive of audit to the Fed, and you're okay on that issue for sure.
But you've expanded it, and you got a little bit of attention, but not enough, and that is auditing the Pentagon.
You, I'm sure, saw this $8 billion.
Oh, the books, we can't figure out where that $8 billion went.
So does anybody join in in auditing the Pentagon?
We have a bipartisan coalition, and quickly on Audit the Fed, it took many years for you to get the momentum going, and finally you had every Republican or virtually every Republican and about 100 Democrats.
You got bipartisan support.
In the Senate, I worked five years.
We finally got a vote.
And we got every Republican save one or two, and then we only got two or three Democrats.
That's our problem.
We need more Democrat support to get audit Fed.
But we got 53 votes and we need 60.
So we're not that far off passing the whole thing and putting it on a president's desk.
On Audit the Pentagon, it's a bipartisan issue.
I think Joe Manchin from West Virginia is on it, and it is insulting to the taxpayer.
The Pentagon says we're too big to be audited, and that should be an insult to every taxpayer.
And also, you know, I personally think that national defense is the number one priority of the federal government, but we shouldn't waste money.
And so if you're putting money into $500 wrenches and $500 toilet seats, you're taking money away from actually money that could be spent wisely.
But it's also important to know that the Pentagon spending since 9-11 in real dollar terms, in constant dollars, is nearly doubled in constant dollars.
And so for people to say we're hollowed out and we're weak and we're at our weakest ever, we have the strongest military, the most advanced technology, and we have professional soldiers, which are better than conscripts.
Decade Of Defense Spending00:01:06
We are unparalleled in our military might.
And if that's used for self-defense, that can be a good thing.
But we can't let them win the argument that, oh, we have to double and triple the amount.
And that was one of the points I tried to make in the presidential election is everybody was like, oh, we've got to increase the military budget by $50 billion.
And I was the only one that said, no, we don't.
We need to actually conserve what we're spending.
We frequently use a chart to show what we're spending on militarism versus what the other countries are doing.
And it's almost we spend as much as everybody else put together.
It's like the top eight or 10 countries combined, we spend more than them.
And it's been that way for decade after decade.
So yeah, I mean, really our allies need to bear more of their own responsibility.
And there's much more self-interest when you're next to a country.
Like if you live next to Ukraine, you have much greater self-interest in it than someone who lives two, three thousand miles away.
Right.
Anyway, we're finishing up.
Rand, thank you for being with us today.
I hope it was as much fun for you as it was for me.
Thanks for having me.
Very good.
I want to thank our audience for being with us today.