The Syria Narrative Comes Apart - With Guest Sen. Richard Black
Nothing the US government tells us about Syria and the alleged chemical attack at Douma makes any sense. VA State Senator and retired US Army JAG officer Richard Black joins today's Liberty Report to draw on his experiences traveling to Syria and following the war. He does not believe what Washington is telling us and he makes a very good case for why we are being lied to.
Nothing the US government tells us about Syria and the alleged chemical attack at Douma makes any sense. VA State Senator and retired US Army JAG officer Richard Black joins today's Liberty Report to draw on his experiences traveling to Syria and following the war. He does not believe what Washington is telling us and he makes a very good case for why we are being lied to.
Nothing the US government tells us about Syria and the alleged chemical attack at Douma makes any sense. VA State Senator and retired US Army JAG officer Richard Black joins today's Liberty Report to draw on his experiences traveling to Syria and following the war. He does not believe what Washington is telling us and he makes a very good case for why we are being lied to.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning into the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams.
Daniel, good to see you.
How are you this morning, Dr. Paul?
Doing very well, and we have a returned guest.
I guess we must have had a good interview a few years ago, back in 2016, and we're delighted to have him back.
He's a state senator from Virginia, and I would put him into the camp of being a very solid conservative.
He doesn't get pushed around.
He takes a stand, and the media picks on him all the time.
So, you know, he has pretty good credentials.
His name is Richard Black, Senator Richard Black.
And we had him on once before because he had just made a trip to Syria.
And we'll talk a little bit about Syria today, but his background is interesting.
He spent like a total of 32 years in the military.
He was in both the Air Force and the Marines.
He volunteered in 1963 during the Vietnam War era.
And interestingly enough, that was the same year.
That was the same year I went, but I didn't volunteer.
You know, I sort of was called to duty.
But anyway, he spent a lot of time.
He got a law degree and then was in the Virginia State Delegates House-like, and then in the Senate now since 2012.
Senator Black, welcome to our program.
It was great to be with you both today.
Good.
You know, we wanted to start off with a little bit about Syria since you've been there.
And since you're trying your best to get the truth out, and you talk about what's really going on over there, we've also noticed in the media that you get attacked by the media.
That's when we really knew you were a good guy, because the people that were attacking you happen to be the ones that attack us all the time.
But you've taken a position where you're trying to show that Assad may not be an angel, but there was a time, I think when you went to Syria, the fact that Assad actually did something to try to protect Christians and Jews, and yet you were even criticized for this, to making this point that maybe a government like Assad,
with its imperfections, might be better for having people get along with each other rather than dissension and dropping bombs and fighting these wars and all the mess that we have over there right now.
Sure.
You know, we're always very quick to demonize.
And if you want to find a demon in this world, look at our ally, Saudi Arabia.
There's plenty of evidence that they were implicit in the attacks on 9-11.
They're making war everywhere.
They have an ongoing war crime against Yemen, which is one of the poorest countries on earth.
Just the other day, they targeted and bombed a wedding ceremony.
And I will tell you, I looked at the video.
This was not a made-up video.
It was truly gruesome.
And we provide them targeting information.
We refuel their aircraft.
And I was amazed.
The other day, I ran across a statement by Wolf Blitzer when he was talking with Senator Rand Paul.
And Rand had put in a measure to block the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia.
And Wolf Beutzer says, so for you, this is a moral issue.
He said, certainly, if a lot of these defense contractors stop selling warplanes, other sophisticated equipment to Saudi Arabia, there's going to be a significant loss of jobs.
And that's secondary from your viewpoint.
So, you know, here we've got the mainstream media, which, you know, you can remember back in the day where they, oh, they were for peace and they were for all of this stuff.
And now they're willing to see us involved in bombing wedding ceremonies in order to sell advanced weapons to the Saudi Arabians.
So I don't know what's happened to our morals in this country, but they have really, really gone downhill.
Right.
Daniel, what do you have?
The Yemen thing was tragic.
You probably saw, Senator Black, this horrible picture of this little boy sleeping next to the body of his dead father after the attack, and that was just heart-wrenching.
But you've been in the news again because you gave a little speech on the floor of the Virginia State Senate.
And some of your colleagues were amused, some of them were not as amused.
But you made a couple of strong points.
You said it's not clear that there was even an attack in Douma at all.
And if there was some sort of attack, you think that Assad might have been framed.
Is that a fair assessment of what you mentioned on the floor?
That is.
And frankly, I went into our whole background of making war in the Middle East and racking up $7 trillion of our national debt in doing that.
And I probably went on a little bit too long because I get very passionate about it.
And I'll tell you, back when we went into Iraq, I knew that this was a stunningly irrational move.
And to the point where I honestly believed it was some sort of a political gimmick.
And I've always regretted that I didn't speak out.
And I thought, you know what?
I know I'm going to irritate a lot of people by doing this.
I'm going to do it so that someday I can look back and I can say, okay, I did whatever I could do.
And, you know, I started off with this thing because I didn't want to see the Syrian Christians slaughtered.
And I thanked President Assad in a letter in 2014.
They had just rescued a whole lot of Syrian villages that were places that were originally evangelized by the apostles of Jesus Christ, who literally, when after Pentecost, they were told go out and preach the gospel.
And so they grabbed a bag of dried fish and their sandals and off they walked.
And it's only 80 miles from the Sea of Galilee until you reach Damascus.
And so they went along the Kalman mountain range and they settled.
And still, even after our six years of war, there are still places where the Aramaic language of Jesus Christ is spoken there.
But I got there and I discovered that not only are the Christians just wonderful people, but also many of the Sunni Muslims are very, very wonderful people.
But they're not the ones who are trained by the Saudi Arabians in Wahhabism, which is this very radical, murderous force.
The people we're supporting over there are the Wahhabists.
They are the ones who believe in the genocide of Christians, of Alawites, of all of the religious minorities.
And frankly, I pick sides.
There are two sides in this war.
There are the venomous, murderous beheaders, and there's the legitimate, duly elected government of Syria.
You can take your choice, but you've got two to choose from.
Now, Dick, you're not bashful in being able to point out the shortcomings of Saudi Arabia, and much of that is very much on target.
But right now, probably one of the closest allies for Saudi Arabia and what's going on there is an Arab country.
I mean, it's Israel, a Jewish country.
Now, when you get criticized, do they throw that in too?
Do they try to turn against you and make you look like a bad person because you're not supporting the Israeli position because they're so close to Saudi Arabia?
Do they ever put you in that category?
I haven't been accused of that.
I had a very interesting experience.
We tend to think of the Israeli people as being monolithic.
But I was at the Republican National Convention, and I was going out to get a hot dog and ran across this young man, and he came bounding up to me, and, you know, very sharp young guy.
And he says, you're Senator Black.
I said, yes.
He says, I'm from Israel.
He said, we love you in Israel.
And I thought, I don't know.
The only thing that they would know in Israel is what I've been saying about the Syrian war.
And also, I have commented to some extent on the Egyptian situation.
And so it just surprised me that there would be that sort of comment.
And so anyway, you know, my view, I support the established boundaries, the internationally recognized boundaries of Israel.
But I do not support Israeli expansionism.
I think that Bibi Netanyahu has far outlived his usefulness.
And I think they need to find somebody new and more effective to be the leader of that country.
We talk a lot about the media on this program, Senator Black, and one of the things that we've been fascinated and horrified at the same time is watching as the Syria narrative comes apart, as we've said.
And that is the media attacking anyone who questions the government's position on Syria.
I thought the media was supposed to be questioning, but we're seeing reporters on the ground, and I know that you've seen some of this because I've seen some of your Twitter comments, but left, right, and center who going to Douma and they're questioning the narrative.
On the left, Robert Fisk, a veteran war reporter, decades of experience.
A young fellow, Pearson Sharp from the right-wing One America news network, was reporting on the ground saying nobody has even heard of an attack here.
And then I would say from the center, the German state TV, ZDF-funded, German-funded state TV, ZDF, which ran a report recently from the ground there saying nobody believes that there was an attack at all in Duma.
So this is an interesting point that the mainstream media is playing, attacking people, questioning their government.
You know, it's really amazing.
I have a few questions here that I wish that our journalists in the mainstream media would ask.
Let me run through them.
If I were the journalist at one of these presidential conferences, I'd say, why didn't Syria use gas against the massive terrorist armies that it faced during 10 weeks of fierce combat in Gouda pocket?
Number one.
Number two, why did Syria use gas against only civilians and sparing thousands of terrorists that they faced?
Number three, why was gas used only after the battle was over and not while the fighting was going on?
Next, why would gas be used knowing that it would guarantee a massive strike from Western forces?
Number five, why would President Assad employ poison gas just after President Trump had said we are leaving Syria very soon?
And he emphasized that in a couple of statements.
And then six, you know, we have been told by our federal government that Syria got rid of all of the sarin gas, and yet suddenly we were able to discern and attack three sarin gas production facilities,
one of which, by the way, I understand was actually a laboratory where they produced anti-venin for snakebite victims.
But, you know, if you got to pretend, you got to pretend.
But anyway, the list goes on and on like that.
And, you know, I was, I actually, I fought as a Marine in Vietnam, and then after law school, I was in the Army Judge Advocate General Corps.
And I was the head of the criminal law division.
And I will tell you that for criminal attorneys, for a prosecutor, you always look for a motive.
What's the motive?
No one can tell you what motive President Assad would have for this.
Some people say, oh, well, because he's crazy.
Well, even crazy people who are in prison have motives.
They may be motives that we find abhorrent.
That's why they're in prison.
But they're motives nonetheless.
People don't act with total irrationality in these things.
And President Assad, I will guarantee you, he is highly intelligent.
He is not irrational at all.
Nick, you were in Vietnam at an early age, 19, I think, when you went in, and you had opinions about war then.
And over the years, you spent a lot of time in the military.
You've been in politics.
And I think you did mention that the Iraq war didn't make any sense.
How have your views changed over that time?
My views have changed over the years.
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I have become more in favor of less intervention and not spending so much time and money overseas.
Are you at a point where you think we're spread out way too much in general, not just in Syria, but in general?
And that if you were in the Congress or someplace, would you be advocating for us to bring some of those troops home and sort of promote a foreign policy of less intervention around the world?
You know, I'm afraid if I were in Congress, they probably would find a steel cage to keep me in.
You know, I would be very outspoken much as you were.
To say that we are overstretched is such an understatement.
I was going to speak, and I was driving on my way to give an address to some group, and I wanted to make the point of how many conflicts we're involved in around the world.
And all of a sudden, I thought, now, wait a minute, are we fighting in Nigeria or in Niger?
And I had to pull off the road, and I had to Google it on my phone to assure myself: yes, okay, we are in Niger.
So we are so overstretched.
People don't even know what continent some of the countries we're fighting on are located.
And so, and I defy anybody.
We've been 17 years in the Middle East, and I defy anyone to demonstrate for me one thing that has been done that has helped the American people or has truly affected vital national interests of the United States, because I don't know of a single one.
And through $7 trillion, we've made a lot of mercenaries, wealthy men.
And we have, I suspect there have been some American politicians who have talked to diplomatic representatives from Saudi Arabia, and they've had a pleasant meeting with Mr. Greene.
And so, Saudi Arabia pulls, you know, they call the shots, the British work with the Saudi Arabians, and, you know, they're all networked together.
But no, our foreign policy is just draining the lifeblood and the moral decency out of this country.
If you go back to the First World War, they used to say this is the war to end all wars.
And even in the Second World War, they said, you know, we're going to bring our boys home, and when we bring them home, it's going to be wonderful.
We don't talk about ever bringing the boys home.
We talk about a long war.
That was Dick Cheney's phrase because he knew we had no intention of getting in and winning and leaving.
This was an enormous profitable venture.
And Dick, we are going to wind this down now, but Daniel has another question or comment.
Yeah, I guess it's more of a comment in a way, but going back to money, because it's a big issue.
You're from Loudoun County.
There are a lot of mansions that were built out there on the backs of the military-industrial complex.
It's one of the richest counties in the country, if not the richest.
So who benefits from these wars these 17 years in the Middle East and elsewhere?
Well, we know it's the defense contractors getting rich.
And meanwhile, you have veterans committing suicide at alarming rates, increasing rates.
President Trump's little one-off missile strike, we hope it's one-off.
Actually, it's two off-a hundred and some missiles fired into Syria in retaliation for the attack, even before we investigated.
But that probably was about a billion-dollar strike when you added the cost per missile, per airtime, moving the ships around, etc.
You know, I just wonder what do you say to a veteran who is struggling to get some basic health care that was promised to him when you see a billion dollars just being tossed out.
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And we're the ones that are called unpatriotic for not supporting such foolishness.
Well, you know, I love our troops.
I love them.
And they follow orders.
They're not geopolitical experts.
They go where they're told.
You know, when Ron and I were kids and we were sent off to fight, we did what we believed in and we assumed that our government was right.
Now, I still, to this day, support some of the conflicts we were involved in against the Soviet Union because it, you know, it truly was the evil empire.
I mean, they had slaughtered vast, vast numbers of people.
They were atheists.
They went after the Christians and so forth.
Here's something of interest.
And I bet you not one of your listeners knows this.
I just stumbled across it, but I happened to look at Russian military medals.
People would be astounded to realize that the highest award that can be given to either a military or civilian person by the Russian government is the Order of St. Andrew the Apostle the First Called.
It's a long name, but it makes its point.
The highest order is named after St. Andrew, the Apostle of Jesus Christ, who was the first called as his follower.
Now you think about this.
Occasionally you'll hear the mainstream media talk about Russia as being an atheist country just because the Soviet Union was very much an atheist country.
Can you imagine in the United States, Congressman Paul, if you had introduced a bill that said we're going to change the Medal of Honor, we're going to call it the Order of Christ our Savior or something like that.
How far would that get out of committee?
And Dick, we are needing to go now, but I want to thank you very much for being on.
You've had a lot of experience in your speaking out.
If you're at the state level, you know a lot about the foreign policy.
But thank you very much for being with us today.
Well, it's great being with you, and I really applaud you for what you're doing.
You know, I listened to you when you were running for president, and I thought, you know, here's a guy who really understands the big picture, and we need more like him.
So I'm glad that your son is in the Senate because he is just, to me, the most rational of all the voices that we have in that rather unusual organization that we call the U.S. Senate.
Very good, and thank you.
And I want to thank the viewers for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.