Today was a fast-breaking news day as the US appears to be moving closer to a massive military assault on Syria over unproven claims that Assad released chlorine gas on Syrian citizens. President Trump Tweeted a military threat to Russia this morning, followed minutes later by a more reconciliatory Tweet. Meanwhile, military movement on the ground, air, and sea suggests a major confrontation is imminent. Will Americans opposed to such a potentially catastrophic clash be able to stop the war machine? Tune in to this special edition of the Liberty Report.
Today was a fast-breaking news day as the US appears to be moving closer to a massive military assault on Syria over unproven claims that Assad released chlorine gas on Syrian citizens. President Trump Tweeted a military threat to Russia this morning, followed minutes later by a more reconciliatory Tweet. Meanwhile, military movement on the ground, air, and sea suggests a major confrontation is imminent. Will Americans opposed to such a potentially catastrophic clash be able to stop the war machine? Tune in to this special edition of the Liberty Report.
Today was a fast-breaking news day as the US appears to be moving closer to a massive military assault on Syria over unproven claims that Assad released chlorine gas on Syrian citizens. President Trump Tweeted a military threat to Russia this morning, followed minutes later by a more reconciliatory Tweet. Meanwhile, military movement on the ground, air, and sea suggests a major confrontation is imminent. Will Americans opposed to such a potentially catastrophic clash be able to stop the war machine? Tune in to this special edition of the Liberty Report.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning into the Liberty Report for this special update on Syria.
We were delayed a little bit this morning on our routine program due to technical problems, but we wanted to get with you on this serious activity going on in Syria.
So, I want to thank you for tuning in.
Daniel Nick Adams, our co-host is with us.
Daniel, welcome to the program today.
Happy afternoon, Dr. Paul.
Okay.
And, you know, the subject, of course, is Syria and what's going on and trying to figure out what our president's doing.
My suggested title of this is Trump's Madness and His March to War, because it just seems like that for one minute, then the next minute we're not sure what he's talking about.
One minute he wants to bring the troops home, and then the next time he's going to blow up the world.
But the first thing I ran into this morning that said that this thing's going to go on was a tweet by Trump.
And it's not exactly a soft tweet.
He says, Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria.
Get ready, Russia, because they will be coming nice and new and smart.
You shouldn't be partners with a gas-killing animal who kills his people and enjoys it.
Same old boost is propaganda.
And I keep thinking, why in the world are we doing this?
Why are we looking for this fight?
The other thought that crossed my mind, Daniel, on this issue was what happened way back in October of 1962, which affected the world political system and it affected my personal life.
And that was during the missile crisis at Cuba.
And I was trying to get my residencies done in medicine.
And yet the episode of the Cuban crisis came up.
And behold, it wasn't too long after that.
I was drafted, ended up in the military for five years.
And of course, my life was changed because I was stationed in Texas and I'm still in Texas.
So events can change things.
But we don't know how this is going to play out.
But the more Daniel and I have looked at this, the more we realize this is potentially very, very dangerous when you think of the amount of weaponsry lining up against each other.
And the one thing that I noticed that is quite different from October 1962, we were worried about an offensive attack on us by the Soviets.
Today, I have to sadly say that we're not on defense anymore.
We're on the offense.
We're too far away from home and we're threatening people.
We have too many troops and we have all those problems.
But it's quite a bit different back then in 62, although we had an imperfect foreign policy really in many ways by the Soviets putting missiles in Cuba, put us on the defense.
But there's a lot of talk of what's going on, a lot of politics going on, a lot of people who would like to impeach Clinton and impeach Trump.
And I just am very concerned.
And Daniel's been keeping up real whole lot on all these UN resolutions because it looks like the Russians would have liked to tone this down, but it looks like our side has been able to handle that quite well.
And the UN has been absolutely no help, which is not too much of a surprise, but they've at least made an attempt.
But Daniel, tell us a little bit about how those votes went.
Well, one other thing before, I'll just follow up on what you said about an early tweet because that very aggressive tweet that you mentioned was followed up just minutes later with another tweet from President Trump, where he says, our relationship with Russia is worse now than it's ever been, and that includes the Cold War.
There's no reason for this.
Russia needs to help with their economy, needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do.
And all we all need nations, we need all nations to work together, stop the arms race.
So it's literally within five minutes, he has a war, threatens Russia with war, and then he has a conciliatory.
So that's one of the reasons people are shaking their heads because he's literally doing a 180-degree turn within five minutes.
So it's, this must be unprecedented in history, Dr. Paul, to have this kind of a president.
Oh, yes.
And, you know, and it's all on so much on hearsay about all the criminality going on.
You know, we just went through this scripple episode, and there's no proof whatsoever that they were poisoned.
And there's been this suggestion, which seems to be attractive to my way of thinking, they might have just had a bad case of food poisoning.
And right now, there's people now in the know who's been around are saying they have no proof of this recent accusation that there's been more gassing and massive killings.
And there's been people over there that are a little bit more credible and saying they can't find the evidence.
And of course, if Russia and Syria wants to bring in some people and get to the truth of this, all they do is get roadblocks in it.
What is amazing to me is how delusional people can be and how they can join and all of almost all of NATO joining in, and they're ready to go to war, and they don't have evidence of anything.
And it's just mind-boggling to think of this.
I mean, they're not dealing with a full stack of cards from my viewpoint.
So I think that it'd be nice to know what Trump is really up to, but we can't really out-guess him.
The one thing is, is no matter what he says and does, it doesn't seem to matter because if you look at the weaponsry out there, and Daniel mentioned it, it's weapons all over the place.
And they don't like it to go unused.
And accidents can happen.
And already some of these accusations on gassing, they very well may be all false flags.
So these false flags and accidents are much more prone to happen with the amount of military force facing each other and the maneuvering of navies and all of these things.
And everybody's lining up the ducks.
So I kept hoping that, you know, maybe we're too much of alarmists and maybe it's not so bad, but it's dangerous.
And hopefully maybe two weeks will say, well, why were we so worried?
But right now, the country and the world has a right to be concerned to try to sort this out.
And I wish the American people would very energetically, you know, send some messages to Washington to say, bank off.
We don't need to be over 6,000 miles away from our home, just looking for a fight and looking for a war.
Well, it is very dangerous, Dr. Paul, and it's dangerous for some very specific reasons.
And I don't think we are overreacting.
And I'll tell you a couple of them.
First of all, there was the interview of the Russian ambassador to Lebanon yesterday.
And he was interviewed on Amanort, a television station, which is a Hezbollah station.
It's self-significant.
And he reiterated in no uncertain terms that if Syria is attacked by a foreign power, not only will those missiles be shot down, but Russia will shoot down the source of those missiles.
And so that would be the U.S. aircraft.
And that would also be the USS Donald Cook if they come from there and wherever else.
So very explicitly earlier today, he said that Russia would respond in that way.
The other thing is we're looking at military movements on the ground.
All throughout the day, the Syrian Air Force has deployed its resources onto Russian air bases, hoping for protection being on the Russian bases in Syria.
I just was looking at a tweet from the Russian embassy in Canada that Russian MPs, military police officers, are being stationed in the Syrian parliament.
That's sending a clear message that if you start attacking non-military targets in Syria, you will be killing Russian soldiers directly.
And the other thing is that the Russians have taken their military vessels out of port in Syria.
Now, you cannot attack if you're in port.
So their ships are out to sea now and facing U.S. ships in the eastern Mediterranean.
So if you just look at movements and objective things on the ground, both sides are preparing for war.
And I guess we shouldn't be shocked that lies have been told in the past and continue to be told.
When you think just back a short time in history, just think how many lies have been told.
First off, the time I was involved in the military in the 60s with Vietnam, that was all based on lie and lied into that war and how many Americans died of there, nearly 60,000.
And then they keep talking about another reason why we have to stop Russian aggression is what they did in Ukraine.
And when you study that, you find out that we were very much involved in the coup that precipitated the crisis.
And it was the lies that we told there, and they continue to tell that.
And what about Iraq?
This is recent history.
Most everybody thinks nobody could defend Iraq.
And yet the guy that did so much promotion of that war, Bolton, he's in the administration now.
And then Libya, that was based on a lie.
Republicans complained about that.
But when the Republicans do the lying, you know, the Democrats demagogue it a bit.
But here we are in Syria based on lies.
And I cannot see how anything productive can come from lies.
I always think that progress in society is based on seeking the truth and trying to get people to understand it.
Well, you know, as you suggested earlier, Dr. Paul, there's a very, very real possibility that there was never a chemical attack in the first place, that the entire thing was staged.
There was a tweet earlier today from a BBC producer where he posted some photographs of how young children's bodies were being placed by white helmets into positions where they were photographed in much more emotional things.
And the BBC obviously is on board with the British government, which is all gung-ho pro-war.
But the other thing, let's not even just take the Russians who were there.
The Syrian army has retaken Duha, which is where the attack took place.
And the Russians are there, and they said they've not detected any chemicals.
They went to the hospital.
No one's being treated.
No one is being treated for chemical exposure.
And even the locals there said they had, you know, nothing has happened in this town.
But let's not even listen to them.
Let's listen to Mattis himself, the defense secretary, who said just a couple of hours ago, we are, quote, we are still assessing the intelligence ourselves and our allies.
We're still working on this.
So even Mattis is admitting, and remember, Mattis just a couple of months ago said, you know, we have never been able to determine that the Syrian government has used gas.
So here he's saying that even though Trump said we're going to bomb, he said as late as just an hour ago, well, we're still looking at the intelligence on this.
So that's pretty remarkable.
Well, you know, the administration's claiming they're putting their coalition together.
I was a little bit surprised of the enthusiasm the French have for this, but they're involved in Great Britain.
That's not a surprise.
They've been doing this all along and they've been buddies with the neocons here and with the Bushes.
And also, it shouldn't surprise anybody that Israel is very much interested in what's going on and they're in a battle over Syria, mainly because of their determination to confront Iran.
And then you have Saudi Arabia, who for many, many decades, when we guaranteed their safety and security as long as they gave us their oil at discount, everything seemed to be okay.
But that's seeming to change right now.
They're using their military forces and we've been helping them in their constant war in Yemen.
To think that even they should have enough on their plate that this just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
It's contagious, this delusional obsession on looking for a fight is contagious, but still blows my mind to see some of these grown-ups, so-called grown-up people going along with it without questioning it and without stopping to say, why don't we check it out?
I think, you know, if you look at some of the things that Russia, why don't we just wait and see?
Why don't we investigate it?
They had a resolution.
Why don't we investigate?
Why is that so horrible?
But the atmosphere is not good.
And it's hard to say what will happen because Trump is unpredictable.
But like you indicated, Daniel, there's a lot of stuff out there, and there's not total control on what's going to happen with this military.
Well, we have an article up on the Ronal Paul Institute website that I encourage everyone to read.
It's an expert that I follow for years.
He's a retired Indian ambassador, and he put forth the possibility that the Israelis may be behind the false flag because they flipped their lids when Trump announced that he wanted to get us out of Syria.
The first person to call him was Netanyahu and started chewing him out.
So there's certainly a possibility there.
But funny you mentioned the French because Macron just said, the French president just said, we promise we're not going to target anything, only the chemical weapons facilities in Syria if we get involved, of which there are none.
They've already been decided that they have none.
But who else is really enthused about this, Dr. Paul, is Teresa May, who's got a big scandal on her lap.
She flew off the handle with the scripple case.
She and Boris Johnson, her foreign minister, lied, outright lied about the Russians being involved in it.
And now she's facing a huge black backlash in the UK.
She's desperate to start dropping some bombs on Syria to change the subject.
In the tradition of Blair, I assume, you know.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
Well, Daniel, I think we're going to take this break now and finish this.
Do you have one last comment you might make?
And I think both of us can plan to be available in the morning and get our program on at time, which is 11 o'clock on Central Time.
So do you want to make one last statement and then we'll close this?
Yeah, just a final comment is that the press briefing at the White House just finished about a half an hour or so ago, maybe an hour or so ago.
And Sarah Saunders, she was asked, you know, are the missiles going to start flying?
Final Remarks on Syria00:01:58
And she said the president has not made any final decision.
Josh Rogan, a neocon at the Washington Post, immediately tweeted out, you know, what the heck is going on?
He's backtracking, you know, so the neocons inferior.
So there's a possibility, a tiny one, that the president may be wavering.
All throughout the internet today, people have been talking about calling the White House, calling the representative, demanding that they not go to war with Syria.
I would say it's critical to keep doing that, do it in a polite but forceful way.
Okay, and I might just add, you know, it's amazing that the only possible opposition to this might come within the administration from neocons that were all appointed by Trump.
And he's excited because he's getting more and more of them in his cabinet and as his advisors.
And then he comes up with this flip-flopping.
But I've said it before.
I keep wondering whether it's just that he doesn't understand what he's doing or he does this purposely to people keep people off balance or what the story is.
But nevertheless, whatever it is, I cannot see even from his viewpoint, how can this person maintain credibility with this sort of thing?
But the other one that we didn't mention today, but is always a possibility, and that is to have something going on in foreign affairs when a president gets into trouble domestically at home.
So that, of course, and ironically, some of these times when you look at the invasion of the Trump attorney, you know, I so often come across very sympathetic to the president because I think this Russia gate and all this collusion stuff is so distracting and so minor compared to this preparation for war.
So I'll tell you, I want to thank our viewers for tuning in today for this audio report.
And we'll be back on our regular programming in the morning.