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Oct. 9, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
34:05
Are US Weapons Fueling The Hamas Offensive?

After US weapons in the hands of Hamas fighters have surfaced on several videos, questions are being asked about how they got there. Were they shipped from Afghanistan, where the US left tons of military equipment in its hasty departure? Were they sold to Hamas by corrupt officials in Ukraine? Also today: Wall Street Journal tries to nudge a war with Iran in a highly sketchy piece claiming Tehran behind Hamas' attack.

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Weapons In Afghanistan 00:11:23
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
Slow weekend, no news?
No news.
Everybody was anticipating, you know, that little skirmish that's going on that could blow up the world.
We're not careful.
There was a lot of predictions, including my thoughts, that, you know, this is a big deal.
The markets are going to be really rocky.
They paid attention, but they weren't really out of control at all.
It wasn't 9-11 again.
But that doesn't mean by the end of the day, things can change because the last thing I saw on the war was Israel started bombing Lebanon.
And that's going to expand, and who knows how many people will get involved.
So this is interesting stuff because, you know, it seems like they're very efficient in using weapons.
They just don't order what they need, and they take good care of them and make sure they can defend their country and be prepared.
No, it's a business.
It's a philosophy.
And I remember not too many years ago that we got a little annoyed with an individual by the name of Hillary.
I think she was involved with foreign policy, and she was going to remake Libya.
And she probably made one of the nastiest comments ever about an individual about the Libyan president.
But anyway, the weapons, some people are now saying that the weapons that we sold, gave away, and begged and pleaded, even though other countries participated to a degree, that weapons had ended up saving us from the Russians.
We had to first save the Ukrainians, so we became more devoted to the Ukrainians.
But the rumor or the story says that they might have used the same weapons that they used in Ukraine against Israel.
Now, I happen to think that's possible, but I happen to also know, how would I know for sure?
And maybe that eventually somebody will write the history of it and relate exactly how those things happen.
But we know they happen.
It's a big business.
New things, secondhand weapons, black markets.
And I imagine these buy and sell and trading weapons is more than just one purchase.
Like you need 10 tanks to defend your country.
Okay, I'll have those tanks and we'll take care of them.
It's not like that.
It's an ongoing process.
And the one thing that I noticed in looking at this to sort of get to understand how important it is that I guess you probably saw this, 80% of the U.S. generals work for arms manufacturers.
80% of them are involved one way or the other.
So they all do well.
They do.
Do well.
And the people suffer.
The poor people, the middle class, they have to fight the wars and die for the wars and pay for the wars through inflation and all these things.
You'd think they would resist a little bit more than they do sooner rather than waiting until after 10 or 20 years, which we've been doing.
Oh, yeah, finally, we should leave that place.
Not going well.
I wonder how we got into this mess.
And fortunately, how we get into these messes and understanding what we should do is not complicated.
It's just rather people understanding and a little motivation.
Maybe we can prevent people from going in.
There have been a few countries throughout history that had an attitude like that and didn't get involved in wars.
But unfortunately, there's been too many people that would go along with it.
But if the people who have to fight the battles and pay for this should be a little bit more astute because you have to assume people in power will do anything that they can get away with.
And that's why we should be very reluctant to put more power and authority into the hands of the politicians and the beneficiaries of all this wealth.
Well, let's put up that first clip because we're talking about a couple of articles.
Now, the first one is from our friend Larry Johnson, who's spoken at our conferences before.
He writes in his sonar21.com blog, Were U.S. weapons sent to Ukraine used in the Hamas attack on Israel?
And go to the next clip because he's talking about reports in the Middle East Telegram channels, which I was reading as well over the weekend, instead of sleeping, claim that Hamas attacks Israeli positions with weapons supplied by Ukrainian sources.
In other words, military aid sent to Ukraine by the U.S. and NATO allegedly was used in the savage attacks launched by Hamas.
If confirmed, this is likely to accelerate demands in the U.S. Congress for tighter oversight.
Now, this is something that we had talked about from the very beginning.
We had warned about when Congress said, we don't want to know, just send more weapons, send weapons from the very beginning, 100 billion.
Just send the weapons.
And some people, and we'll talk about one of those persons early on, said, Hang on a minute, is this a good idea?
You know, and this is the byproduct of our interventionist foreign policy.
We go everywhere, we fight wars everywhere.
You mentioned Hillary when we started.
Well, the whole Syria uprising was fueled by weapons from Libya that we had left there.
So on and on it goes.
Most recently, we have Afghanistan, where we left billions of dollars worth of weapons.
Now, there's speculation that some of Hamas's weapons came from Ukraine on the black market, that may well be true.
But a lot of it may have come from Afghanistan as well.
So it could have come from any one of these theaters of war where the U.S. is involved.
And you might say, if you're cynical, is this a bug or a feature of our policy?
Because those weapons everywhere just kind of guarantee that there's going to be war all the time and everywhere and disarray.
So maybe that's what we're seeing here.
You know, that is the reason some people have been motivated over the years, many years, that there should be more monitoring and finding out where these weapons go and audit what's happening.
And yet they can't even pass a bill to have somebody just monitor.
There's been some examples, and I guess a little bit of that was done in Afghanistan or someplace.
But the whole thing is, it's free for all.
It's free for all.
And the whole idea that they don't have to be audited.
And it isn't, well, they don't have enough money.
They used to say the Fed couldn't afford to do that because they didn't have enough money.
We can't supply that type of information.
But that's the big, big problem is it's turned over to the deep state.
Well, the deep state turns it over to their black state.
And they get to play games with it and rotate it around if they have to.
And if they blow up a few, that's part of the problem or the plan.
You know, these weapons aren't any good.
They're going to find out.
Well, we get to build new ones.
So it's very bad, but it's coming to an end because it's already at a point where people realize we can't, you know, the big fight in the Congress right now is over.
More money for Ukraine.
But at the same time, there's a lot more people want to send more money to China, and there'll be more people wanting to put it into the Middle East, too, because if that war expands, who knows what will be sent over there.
It's already cost us a lot of money.
It will continue, but it'll run out.
There's no way that we can have this foreign policy and a monetary policy and a moral system that we have today, and that this won't come crashing down on our heads.
And we ought to prepare for that on how we're going to replace it.
Yeah.
Well, Johnson wasn't the only one writing about this.
There's a lot of speculation on Twitter.
And Scott Ritter wrote a piece for RT, if we could put the next one up, because he was thinking the same thing, watching some of the weapons that were being used or weapons that we had not seen before in the hands of Hamas.
Scott Ritter writes, Are Hamas fighters using American weapons meant for Ukraine?
And then the subtitle: When it comes to weapon supplies, the U.S. is its friend's worst enemy.
Go to the next one because here's what Scott Ritter was talking about.
The most recent example of this phenomenon appears to involve Hamas and the attacks perpetrated by militants affiliated with that organization on military and civilian targets in Southern video.
He's talking about a video that purports to show a Hamas fighter thanking Ukraine for the provision of small arms.
Again, none of these have been verified.
However, you're seeing a lot more videos showing them using the Hamas using U.S.-made weapons.
Go to the next clip because Scott Ritter quotes Marjorie Taylor Greene from Florida, I mean from Georgia, sorry, and she makes a good point.
She says, We need to work with Israel to track serial numbers on any U.S. weapons used by Hamas against Israel.
Do they come from Afghanistan?
The congresswoman asks.
Do they come from Ukraine?
Highly likely.
The answer is both, she says.
Now, put up that bonus round, bonus clip that I forgot to add in the additional one, because this is from the same article from Scott Ritter.
And Scott writes, The wide availability of U.S.-made weapons on the global black market used by terrorists/slash freedom fighters to arm themselves is reflexive of the lax approach the U.S. takes when it comes to providing weapons.
And he goes on to say, This became evident in May of 22, the fact that these weapons escape when Rand Paul, a Republican senator from Kentucky, who we both know, tried to have an inspector general put in place to monitor and account for some $40 billion in military assistance to Ukraine requested by Biden.
Senator Paul's motion was overwhelmingly defeated by a Congress which appeared to be happy to assume a hear-no evil, see no evil, speak no evil posture when it came to the issue of Ukraine and corruption.
So, in a really practical way, Dr. Paul, this is how U.S. foreign policy ends up hurting even our so-called friends and allies around the world because they're on the receiving end.
U.S. Foreign Policy's Casualties 00:08:47
Yeah, it doesn't make any sense at all for this to continue.
And, of course, it will end, and that's what we have to prepare for.
But it's evidently been going on this way for a long time, probably more so since after World War II.
I don't think they had the same type of situations in the years before World War II.
But now it is that all these skirmishes, war has changed, and it's become more of a business.
Maybe it's become a racket.
A racket, yeah, exactly.
They famously called it, war is a racket.
That's right.
Well, I was glued to the screen over the weekend watching what's happening, trying to understand what was going on and how things were going.
Unfortunately, I had to witness the horrific scenes, thank God not to experience them, of the attacks on civilians, and they're awful, the attacks by Hamas on Israeli civilians.
And now we're seeing the last couple of days the attacks of Israelis on innocent Palestinian civilians.
I think there are some 500 civilians now that have been crushed under falling buildings as a retaliation.
So it really is awful and disgusting when civilians find themselves in the middle of these skirmishes as they always seem to do.
But, you know, it goes back to some of the things that you were talking about on 9-11, which is the issue of what are the motivations, what's happening, what's behind this attack.
We don't know everything about it, but there's the accusation, and you faced it in your career many times, the accusation that by searching for a motive, you're excusing the crimes.
And that's not true in any part of criminal investigative history.
The one thing is they don't want to understand the motivation because they may be involved in participating in motivating people to do these things.
So, no, they don't want to talk about it.
And, you know, afterwards, we're at a point where we don't know exactly every individual who did the planning for 9-11 and all.
But at least the head of the conspiracy was bin Laden.
And he was speaking for a large group of people.
And they asked him, well, why do you have to do that?
And George Bush had explained, you know, it was for freedom.
Because we were free and prosperous, so they didn't like us any longer.
Well, that one didn't hold water.
But the other things that Bin Laden said was, you know, one thing he resented, because he was a religious person, was the Saudi Peninsula, it was Holy Land.
And we had military troops in there, and the Saudi people, the government people, were being too friendly to us to put our military on holy land.
And generally speaking, he said, lo and behold, it's the way America treats the Palestinians and putting the blame on America for much of the problem.
And also, at that time, it was the constant bombing of Iraq.
And, you know, that sounded good.
But the American people didn't want it.
They were doing it because we were wealthy and good people, and it was moral.
They didn't like our movies.
So that cleaned up.
The movies are very clean now.
But what could be the motivation for this?
And this is sort of speculative because the people who literally make the decision or drop the bombs and kill people, you can't tell what it is.
Maybe somebody was knocking on their door with a gun and shooting their kids.
But anyway, everybody's heard in the major news for years about the settlements.
There's some land in the Palestinian area and in Gaza and all that had been more or less designated for the Palestinian.
But it was very, very messy, where the Bunnelis were.
But of course, it was set up by the UN, and they're smart people, and they're always fair and equal and make sure everybody's treated equally.
And also, the people, especially in Gaza, I mean, it's a prison camp.
You can't drive, I go out, trade with people, anything like that.
And that's a blockade.
I've always argued that when we start putting on sanctions on people, we ought to consider an act of war.
Well, sanctions are supposed to be a little friendlier than a real blockade because the blockade blocks trade and people traveling and families going back and forth.
So the blockade's been on for 15 years and people suffer.
So you can imagine somebody might not feel so friendly about that.
And this is something that there are motivations there.
It's messy, and there are no angels on either side as far as I'm concerned.
And I think the outside organizations like the UN, NATO, and all these other organizations get involved, especially since World War II.
Just think, you know, the war had hardly ended, and Truman had us, you know, going to war in Korea without a declaration of war.
So these international globalist governments, all they have to do is work to who's going to control these governments.
And we're in the business because we've been managing it financially.
We had the World Reserve Currency, and we've had a lot of money, and we can buy influence, and we have been able to be in charge of the empire that gets hold of this and is behind so much of it.
At least they know about it.
And the one obstacle about reaching the truth of things is the cynicism.
And I'm sure you remember when I would make a statement about why don't we look at the causes of why 9-11 happened.
Oh, you're an American hater.
You don't like it.
You hate the troops.
All that nonsense.
But I think those questions should be asked right now.
And I've seen a couple on television where people have brought this.
It's not like it's zero.
There's a few people out there that think, I mean, they even reported some demonstrations in New York City that was not just pro-Israel.
But this is a mess.
And I still think that the mess is all the granting of power and money we give to those people who're in the business of doing this stuff.
Yeah.
Well, you mentioned the blockades.
You know, the Israeli defense minister announced, I think it was this morning, that they're not only going to block their entrance and exit, they're going to block electricity, food, and water supplies to these 3 million people who are crammed in this small place.
And, you know, it's sort of typical of all governments.
The U.S. government has done it all the time.
You double down on a bad policy.
I mean, that's how you created all this hatred in the first place.
You're going to double down on a dumb policy and expect to have a different outcome.
You know, I don't think that's going to work.
But you look for motivations, and I'm sure there's plenty of them.
It doesn't excuse it, as you say.
Obviously not.
But everyone is so hyped up they can't understand that.
But on October the 5th, which is two days before the attacks, a group of Israeli settlers stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is one of the most holy sites for the Muslims and what have you.
They stormed it.
They felt like the Muslims felt like it was being desecrated by Israelis being in there breaking into their church, basically.
It'd be like if a bunch of Muslims broke into the Vatican or something.
People get irritated when you do stuff like that.
I'm not saying it justifies it.
And not saying that that directly affected, because this was an attack that was long in the planning.
They had a lot of time to plan this out, and they did some things that nobody expected, including those crazy paragliders that they somehow landed and took over an Israeli base.
But nevertheless, when you keep seeing these kinds of pushing and pressure and provocations, there is going to be a backlash.
So the solution, again, is not to do the same thing that causes the problem.
Maybe seeking some mediation instead of trying to kill all the Palestinians and ethnically cleanse the area might be helpful.
Street Journal Provocations 00:08:54
And I think the Egyptians, as I understand this morning, they offered to help mediate the exchange of prisoners.
Now, that might be a way to start it.
Exchange of prisoners, start talks, but of course, that's not what the neocons want.
No, no.
Some of them like the domestic chaos and also the international chaos because those who are looking to spread the radical socialism and fascism, you know, they're not just thinking about a state or one country.
They're thinking about globalism.
And a lot of them approach that way: there's global organizations, and I think that's why you see borders are being challenged.
The one thing to have that type of globalism, you get rid of the borders and you can control the people.
I wanted to mention a little bit more about an article that I looked at this morning.
And this was written by Ray McGovern when they asked him to give a summary because he's good.
He's been a friend.
He's a friend.
He's spoken at all.
He worked with us all the time.
But there was a time when I looked, he's a CIA guy.
I better be careful.
27 years.
So I looked into that.
And here, his first year in the CIA was in 1963.
And of course, that was a big year for the CIA.
And he said that he himself mentioned, and I didn't see the complete story about this, that he had a lot of things to say about the assassination.
But he was very, very blunt.
Everybody should be blunt.
There shouldn't be question because the conspiracy people now are trying to spell truth.
They're trying to get rid of anybody thinking that there is truth out there.
But he very much endorsed the whole theory and idea, and he was pretty darn close to it, that the CIA definitely was involved.
But I'd have a hard time seeing how anybody could try to, by logic, objectively try and prove that the CIA is not guilty.
Not the whole CIA, but certain people.
And he was not very kind.
The little bit that I saw recently, he was not kind to Alan Dulles.
And of course, we haven't been, he's not our best friend.
I'd rather put my luck in with Ray McGovern than Alan Dulles.
Ray had some good things to say, interesting things to say about this.
You read the article when he was, I guess, responding to a question about what's happening in Israel.
Oh, yeah, he's determined to show that it doesn't happen because the Palestinians are evil people and want to take over the world.
But it gets very complex in a political sense.
But he would be one, I would think.
We had him on our program.
Now I'm thinking about it.
We ought to maybe get him back on.
But he's getting pretty old.
He's in his 80s, so we have to be careful with people like that.
80 is a new 40, right?
Yeah, there you go.
Yeah, so was there something in Ray's thing that you wanted to mention?
Because I thought he had some good points here that he was going to make.
But anyway, we'll recommend that.
That's on anti-war.com's blog.
And he had a good synopsis of what's happening in Israel.
But I guess we'll move on to people who are trying to benefit from what's happening in Israel.
And one of those would be the neocons.
I know that's going to shock you, Dr. Paul.
But the Wall Street Journal, which has always been called the War Street Journal, ran with the piece, if you can put the next one up.
That's what they ran with yesterday.
Go to the next one if you can.
Iran helped plot an attack on Israel over several weeks.
That's what they're claiming.
When you start getting into the meat of the story, however, it sounds a little bit more sketchy because they have zero sources for this incendiary claim.
Because you may have heard, Dr. Paul, over the weekend, Lindsey Graham believes we should now go to war with Iran because Iran is behind this whole thing.
So it's very touchy.
Go to the next one.
Bernard at Munava, Alabama did an analysis of the Wall Street Journal article, and his first comment is: So, Wall Street Journal authors in Dubai have access to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah.
He said, both groups are notorious for their secrecy, and their senior leadership is usually hidden away.
These facts alone are enough to debunk the report as nonsense.
But the Wall Street Journal authors continue.
We don't have any information at this time to corroborate this account, said a U.S. official.
It sounds to me like the Biden administration does not want to go with this whole idea that Iran is behind it, and that's understandable.
But the neocons are pushing it.
They're losing their war in Ukraine, and there's a danger that they're not going to be able to continue with this war machine.
So what do they do?
Well, they gin up another war in the Middle East.
Well, I think it might be a distraction.
And maybe Iran is playing a little bit cool when they think about another skirmish like this.
And they actually have shown signs that they'd like to sell oil and this sort of thing and live in the real world.
But I think they have a bigger plan.
I think they're not going to begin, maybe this is true, that they don't want to get messed up with all these skirmishes that last for so long and they don't gain that much.
Is that maybe they're more determined to become closer allies to Russia and China and India because they're pretty good at financing it.
Well, they've just opened up and insisting that every Chinese citizen should be buying gold and they're encouraging him to buy gold.
So they're in financial planning maybe in a very serious manner.
And I could see where they might think that would be more worthy activity than going and getting involved in another war, which is a lot of killing going to go on over there.
But it remains to be seen because I'm sure they do not have any friendly feelings to the Palestinians.
But who knows?
Yeah, well, I mean, the Israelis.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, let's go to that next clip because this is another aspect of the Wall Street Journal article that's interesting.
Now, Ali Hashem is, I believe, an Iranian journalist, and he writes about this, if we can go to it.
With all due respect, and regardless of the sourcing, I'm a bit worried with some details in this piece.
One, why would the Iranian foreign minister attend a meeting to discuss a military operation?
And two, how come all these factions were involved in the planning over the past period with zero leaks?
And that's always a good argument against conspiracy theories.
But the Wall Street Journal article, this very, very much explosive article blaming Iran for this, has a new twist that came out this morning.
If we can go to the next one, this is Andrew McGregor Marshall, and he writes, the main reporter on this story, Summer Saeed, has a history of dishonesty and inventing stories.
I fired him from Reuters in 2008 for this reason.
I'm surprised the Wall Street Journal has hired her and is publishing her stories that are clearly bogus.
Now, we have not checked this out, however, but we do know that in the run-up to the Iraq War, people like Judith Miller, all the people around her were also writing these bogus stories about the involvement of Saddam, et cetera, et cetera.
So very much could be the case here.
Well, that sort of puts a monkey wrench into smooth sailing for their conspiracy theories or their promotion of a conspiracy theory.
So that's fascinating.
Yeah, well, we'll see what happens.
Well, we'll keep an eye on it, Dr. Paul.
And I think we've probably bit off as much as we can chew this morning.
And I will just remind our viewers, first of all, thank our viewers for tuning in, but remind them this is Monday, so you've got another whole week to participate in the Ron Paul Institute's autumn fundraising.
If you can put on that very last clip and see Dr. Paul signing those great books.
I'm starting now, I'm really happy because the books are arriving, Dr. Paul, and I'm getting notes back from people that are talking about how much they're enjoying it.
All of a Sudden They're Not So Noble 00:04:59
One said he's enjoying it in a way, but it's kind of alarming some of the things that you've written in this book.
But we are giving this book as a thank you gift for those who participate in our autumn fundraising.
I will put a link in the description of this program for how you can get your book sent to you for your tax-deductible donation to the Ron Paul Institute.
And Dr. Paul, I'm going to send it back over to you.
My theory about these kind of problems, if you look into it, you'll find out that somebody in the military-industrial complex or in the globalists who want to plan everything and tell people what to do, usually you go back to them and they either did it out of stupidity or they did it for a reason.
But certainly the world changed after World War II because they had, that's when they really accepted.
They didn't like, the people didn't accept the League of Nations, but they accepted the United Nations.
And we've been suffering from that philosophy, whether it's NATO or other organizations like this, globalism is on the run.
But I can feel certain that when you turn it over to politicians, whether they're local politicians or one in a state or a community, and they're making all the decisions that it's going to be unstable, they may come up with.
So I think the closer at home the people get to make these decisions.
So if you're going to have people living with each other and they generally have conflicts, you better be very careful and they better both volunteer and agree to it.
But when the outsiders come in and say, all right, we'll do this and this.
So some people now ask, and I think McGovern asked this question, you know, when they wanted to solve this problem, and there was a lot of reason to be very sympathetic to the Jewish people.
So they wanted to give them a homeland.
But they didn't even think about that when it came to the Palestinians.
So it wasn't by the Palestinians' viewpoint, it wasn't even fair at the beginning.
It didn't erode.
And it's just gotten worse over the years.
And of course now they're literally practically in a prison camp when they're held in the, you know, by these by all these people literally saying that there's a blockade and you can't go.
So I think there's a better way to do it.
And the basic principle I think is no matter what we do or think, whether it's personal, religious, medical, educational, whatever, everything should be voluntary.
And all of a sudden, the violence dissipates because you can't do anything.
You can't take anybody's property.
But the biggest problem with that is the people who want power, you know, like big government because they don't want volunteerism.
They want authoritarianism.
And that's why government has to be small.
Because so far, the bigger the government, the less freedom we have.
So we have to get it where people are confident that the smaller the government, the better off we are and the safer that we are.
But most people are lulled to sleep and listen to the politicians making all these promises.
Oh, yeah, you have a problem.
We're going to take care of it.
Who's going to pay your bills?
And they go on and on.
And the people are lulled to sleep and they become gullible and they are naive and they go along with it thinking they're going to get a free lunch.
I tell you what, there is no such thing.
Eventually somebody has to pay.
Unfortunately, the people who believe they're getting the most help, the people who have already been suffering from other government programs, are the ones who gets the pain and the suffering more.
When the wars start, you know, they're the ones who suffer.
You know, the young people who have to go to war and people, you know, suffer from inflation and all these things.
So we have to wake up the people to the point when their government starts moving toward war.
They better ask questions.
And the one question that I've learned to ask over the years is what are the motives for this?
Why are they doing this?
And all of a sudden, they're not so noble.
The motives can be very often power and struggle and control of other people.
That can change if we change the people's mind.
That's why we have the Institute for Peace and Prosperity believing that volunteerism, although it's an unachievable goal to have it perfect, it certainly is a goal that we should move toward compared to accepting the whole fact that authoritarianism just means we need stronger people to tell us what to do and that'll solve all our problems.
I don't believe that.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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