Iran Takes Back Oil Stolen By US. Neocon Heads Explode.
Iran has seized the exact cargo ship seized by the United States last year, raising the stakes in the Middle Eastern tinderbox. The US seized the ship and confiscated the million barrels of Iranian oil as a punishment for violation of US sanctions. Now the Iranians are likely to "get their oil back" from the exact same (renamed) ship, this time carrying Iraqi oil. Also today: US moves closer to seizing Russian assets and Speaker Johnson pledges the US to defend Taiwan.
Hello, everybody, and thanks for tuning into the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you today.
Happy Thursday, Dr. Paul.
How are you?
Thursday already.
Yes, my Friday.
Okay, very good.
And they had a big debate last night.
Does anybody know much about it?
I didn't watch it.
You know, I'll have to talk about family things because Carol and I watched a little bit of it.
She's not into politics unless they're accidentally, you know.
But anyway, last night was different.
I said, I have to go look at a computer.
The computer is better than what I'm watching here.
She kept watching that.
And, you know, her superficial conclusion, just by glaring at that stuff, she says, that woman comes across smart.
So I wouldn't endorse that she's the smartest woman in the world.
But Carol's interpretation was she came across knowing what she was talking about.
Good point.
And she didn't have the same thing to say about the opposition.
DeSantis, yeah.
And I've often wondered why DeSantis was so high and it goes down, but impressions are pretty important.
For sure.
But I said, sometimes people come across being real smart.
It's what they're smart about.
That makes a difference.
Sometimes we worry about somebody in a position of power and they're real smart and we know a few of them.
They have high IQs, but what good's an IQ if they don't have a standard of morals that you can trust?
And what they say is true and they don't lie.
And that's a job finding that.
But anyway, we're trying to sort out some truth here about oil.
You know, oil prices are down.
They were over $100 not too long ago.
They're down to $70, even dip below $70.
But there's still, you know, contests for oil is still very, very important.
And as time goes on, it's going to get a lot more important because the Mideast war and the China affairs are going on.
And I think there'll be an event that will drive prices of oil up, not by the market, but by the foreign policy that we have.
But anyway, there was the headline in Zero Head says, Iran Ijax oil tanker in the Gulf of Omen.
Oh, what?
The steel now.
Oil?
Oh, we find out it's the oil that we stole from them, you know.
And that is, there's a big issue on us taking oil.
And, you know, it's one of these things is it's part of a big system of sanctions.
Just think how long we've had sanctions on Iran.
And I often wondered, who really gets to use them?
Does anybody earn interest on these things?
You never hear anything about it.
So I asked them to have an audit when we do the Fed audit.
And they say, oh, no, this is top secret on who really gets to use this money.
Anyway, they have had a lot of money and banking sanctions against them.
And they resent it.
You know, I don't know why they aren't more tolerant.
We're such nice people.
So anyway, they reacted this time.
And there was ship carrying some of that oil in the Gulf of Omen.
And they were able to, I guess in the process, I don't know where they have it all in the bank yet, but they literally were able to seize the ship because they want to get their oil back.
But, you know, I imagine, because there's very biased reporting in both ways, sometimes a radical left wing and then radical right wing, but the neocons are saying, oh, this is an act of war, you know, picking on us.
We can't let it, we can't be pushed around like that.
So there's a lot of people thinking that this is how we are supposed to act.
And the basic assumption they're making is we have an empire to defend, and we're good people, and we will always argue for peace and stop these bad wars coming.
And the facts don't quite bear that out.
So anyway, this is an issue.
Not a lot of talk about it, but in a way, there's some deep concern about what this means.
And the Iranians are not going to put up with it.
And this is also the reason and motivation.
Not only do they want to get they want to get their oil back, they also want to make sure these sanctions are removed.
And secretly, they're planning on competing with the dollar as a reserve currency.
Now that might be a big deal.
And there are some who are saying closer and closer.
I would say it's getting closer because I expect it to happen.
But those who are saying closer or closer, some of them even anticipate more moves will be made because there have been some big trades made with oil in Russia.
And they're determined.
But it's explainable, it's understandable.
But if you say too much, and we have to be very careful because we don't want to be seen as unpatriotic.
Because if you take a position that you're trying to point out shortcomings of our own government, that means you're unpatriotic, you know, and you just can't do that.
So, but I think that there's no risk if you tell the truth, maybe short term, but long term, telling the truth and trying to seek out the truth.
And that's what we'd like to do today: seek out the truth on what's really going on and how much of it is all our fault.
Well, it's a tinderbox in that region.
We know that for a fact.
The Houthis in Yemen are defending Gaza, the Palestinians in Gaza.
That's what they claim that they're doing.
And they've stopped all shipping going through the Red Sea, essentially.
And you can see it on maps.
We've had the assassination of several top figures by the Israelis, Hezbollah and Hamas figures.
We had an act of terrorism inside of Israel that killed, I don't know, 200 people.
So obviously, there are a lot of tensions in the region.
And now when you add this, and if you put on that first clip, you'll see the way that Zero Hedge frames it.
And I think this is the way that the mainstream media is going to frame it.
Iran hijacks oil tanker in Gulf of Oman.
Now they sound like pirates.
They hijacked an oil tanker.
It sounds like out of the blue.
I'm not criticizing Zero Hedge here.
They're actually done us a favor by previewing how it will come out in the mainstream media.
But Iranian naval forces, acting under a court order, seized Marshall Islands flag tanker St. Nicholas, Bloomberg reports, citing Iran's semi-official Tasim agency.
The report said St. Nicholas is a U.S. oil tanker.
So Iran, in the midst of all of these tensions increasing, they go out and steal and seize a tanker.
Now here's from the same article.
This is a tweet.
If we go to the next one, the tankertor.com with more background.
The tanker which the Iranians have boarded today in the Gulf of Oman is the St. Nicholas carrying Iraqi oil.
This is where it gets interesting, Dr. Paul. formerly known as the Suez Rajan, she was seized by the U.S. government for having transported a million barrels of Iranian oil in connection to a U.S. company.
So initially this ship was seized by the U.S. government because it had Iranian oil.
And we told the Iranians they're not allowed to sell their oil.
And this is an example of the international rules-based order.
We make the rules, you take the orders.
And it didn't work this way because the Iranians, you know, there's this expectation that Georgia is going to forget that we stole a billion barrels of their oil.
Well, they don't.
Countries don't forget these slides.
But nevertheless, we talk a lot about narratives.
And this is a narrative and this is going to be how it sells.
They stole a U.S. ship.
And already we're seeing the neocons put the next one up.
The neocons are braying for war over this.
Iran knows it can attack ships and now seize them because the Ayatollahs know Joe Biden is too weak to respond.
In other words, why haven't we attacked them yet?
That's why they're seizing our ships.
We haven't declared war.
So that's how the neocons are going to frame this.
And the real fight going on is the propaganda on both sides.
But it seems like our side is sort of desperate to how to put a positive spin on this.
But already we have people saying that if you don't go along with the scenario, that you have to say, we've been hijacked and we better do something about it.
And if not, you're too weak.
And, you know, you call Biden too weak.
But we have neoconservatives and Republicans are saying, oh, we can't act weak.
You know, if we take the oil, it becomes our oil for a while until there's enough reaction to it.
But the neocons want to spin this in a way of it's they're almost like on a noble cause.
It's all about money and oil and this sort of thing and power.
But they also always talk about patriotism.
And we have a few in the Congress that sort of sort of annoys me to say the least on their attitude that you have to go along with this militancy.
And they never say, well, you know, our friends at the military industrial complex, they need this activity.
This is the way the appropriations get done.
This is the way we've done it for 50 years or longer.
And so they want to justify it.
And they want to paint it.
And it was the same way.
When I wanted to bring troops home in the Middle East and save some of that killing, they say, well, you're not being patriotic.
You're not for the defense of America.
And it just happens that non-intervention is the best defense that America can be offered.
And that is what they reject here.
All this intervention, who has the oil and what are we going to do, and how are we going to store up trouble?
How can we keep the appropriations going?
The whole mess.
So there's no real challenge there.
Even some of the people who are close to the can't quite paint it in that picture of the big picture.
And they go along with it.
But I think there are some cracks in the wall, especially when we see them talking about no more money for Ukraine, you know, this sort of thing, which we have to encourage.
Well, you know, you have the system where the U.S. has unilaterally declares that Iran is a terrorist state.
And they say, because we've decided you're a terrorist state, you can no longer engage in global trade.
And then the U.S. expects Iran to say, oh, okay, you got us.
We'll stop, you know.
And the world just doesn't work that way.
It's a fantasy that it works that way.
And now here's a press release from the Justice Department just last September where they give us a little bit more detail about what happened initially.
Justice Department announces first criminal resolution involving the illicit sale and transport of Iranian oil in violation of U.S. sanctions.
We sanctioned Iran saying they can't sell their oil.
And Iran said we want to sell our oil anyway.
And so underneath it, you see the subtitle.
The government also seized almost 1 million barrels of Iranian crude oil.
And go to the next clip.
This is from the same press release from the Justice Department.
The contraband cargo is now the subject of a civil forfeiture action in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
The U.S. forfeiture complaint alleges the oil aboard the vessel is subject to forfeiture based on U.S. terrorism and money laundering statutes.
So when we take it, it's called civil forfeiture.
When they take it back, it's called hijacking.
I think of Maggie.
A law out of thin air, and we pass a law, and we act upon it, and we have the currency, and we have the bombs, and we have the ships, and we're going to go do it.
And they think that's the proper rule of law.
But what I sense, and many other people's sense, of what's going on here, both in foreign policy and in monetary policy and financial policy, things are coming to an end.
And they can unravel at a certain pace for a long, long time.
And everybody knows eventually it'll happen.
But the final conclusion of this goes quickly.
So that's why it would be foolish to say that we are so wise.
We know this is a false policy.
There are so many fallacies in it that it's going to continue to deteriorate.
And it's pretty safe because you can't have $32 trillion of debt and think you can just print your way out of it.
But the whole thing is, we can do that.
But eventually the end stages are very, very rapid and very, very rapid and chaotic.
And that is when we point out all the times that our civil liberties are being threatened, especially under COVID.
Look at what they were doing to it.
Under wartime conditions, they use that all the time.
But when there's a final stage and a breakdown of a currency as well as an empire, believe me, it's up for grabs on what might happen.
That's why it's so crucial to get as many people as possible to be prepared for what's coming.
And, you know, some people may watch this and say, why are you defending Iran?
You know, do you love Iran?
No.
I mean, I think our point is the system doesn't work.
For every reaction, there's going to be a reaction.
If you steal someone's stuff, they're going to try to steal it back.
It's true in our neighborhoods, and it's true on a global scale.
Now, you can get away with it for a while.
And the U.S. has had unprecedented power from the end of the Cold War for maybe 25 or so years.
But now that power is waning because it's been exploited and used by extreme interventionists and expended.
All the power and global authority has been expended by them.
And now we're in a situation where some of these countries can strike back and say, hey, we had to sit here and watch you steal our stuff for a long time.
Now we're in a position to steal it back.
And so that's not a good place to be.
So we're not, just like we're not defending terrorists when we said the Patriots shouldn't be spying on us, you know, and claiming to go after terrorists.
Anyway, the next thing we want to talk about is the same thing about seizure.
And this is something that may happen in the future.
And this raises it to a whole new level.
Seizing Russian Assets: Future Moves?00:05:46
If you can put this next to not, this is from Bloomberg.
White House throws support behind seizing frozen Russian assets.
And go to the next clip because President Joe Biden's administration is backing legislation that would let it seize some $300 billion in frozen Russian assets to help pay for reconstruction of Ukraine, a shift as the White House seeks to rally support in Congress to further fund the war.
The memo from the NSC says this bill would provide the authority needed for the executive branch to seize Russian sovereign assets for the benefit of Ukraine.
So in a sense, what the administration is saying is we're going to do to Russia just what we did to Iran.
I always try to draw lines at a certain place where you step over the line of constitutionality and morality.
And when it comes to this sort of thing, the line that I draw is that if you put on sanctions and you're powerful enough to do it to serve your own interest, that you're actually participating in an act of war.
I think a sanction is like a blockade.
And nobody in this country would want them to do it to us.
Matter of fact, they get hysterical if they had a little bit of retaliation.
But the sanctions is a form of blockade.
You're cutting off supplies, and it's done for very, very self-centered reasons.
You know, territory, money, the empire, all of these things.
And it may be, you know, a few lobbyists that come to town that benefit from all this nonsense.
What's interesting about this talk of seizing the assets.
Now, I think in a way it's meant to pressure Republicans to go along with this $100 billion in additional aid to Iran.
I mean, to Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan.
I think that's partly what it is, a propaganda ploy.
However, it's interesting when you take a look at who's against this.
And I'll thank my friends at the Duran for bringing this article to my attention.
But the globalist extreme anti-Russia Financial Times had an excellent piece about this.
Now, a lot of Americans might say, well, why don't we steal their money?
They invaded Ukraine.
They should pay for it.
However, it's more complex than this.
And of all things, the FT has a good point.
If you can just put this up, I'm just going to do a couple quotes of this, Dr. Paul, to lay it out.
Go back one.
Go forward one.
Yeah, there we go.
This is the Financial Times.
Nicholas Mulder writes, the West would harm itself with rash seizures of frozen Russian assets.
That's a tongue twister.
Go to the next.
I just want to really quickly, Dr. Paul, if you don't mind, bring out the points that he's making.
Continued Western aid to Ukraine is morally, legally, and strategically urgent.
So the writer is very pro-Ukraine and anti-Russia, but he says, yet, as a justification for confiscating Russian state assets, the reprisals argument has three problems.
One, it lacks compellant effect.
It is being invoked by the wrong parties, and it undermines the rules-based order Western governments claim to defend.
And I'm just going to do a couple quick points, if you don't mind, Dr. Paul, to set the stage here.
If you go to the next one, economic reprisals are the prerogative of injured states, not of third parties.
Belligerents can also expropriate public and private property belongings to their opponents, states, and citizens.
Yet Kiev's allies are not at war with Russia.
So legally, they're not parties to this, and they claim it over and over.
We're not at war.
So he says, Kiev's allies are not at war with Russia.
Belgium and France have frozen most Russian assets holding 206 billion euros worth of securities in a Brussels-based depository.
But to expropriate these, they would have to become a more direct party to the Russo-Ukrainian war.
And final one, I'm sorry to go on too long, but this I think is very important.
So a little bit of historical context.
Germany lost most of its overseas property after the First World War.
But seizing countries could only activate their powers of confiscation by declaring war on the Kaiser.
And he goes on to say that another precedent is the seizure of Iraqi assets in 1990, but that followed UN authorizations for an intervention.
So essentially, in order for the U.S. and its allies to seize this, it would have to declare that itself is a party to the war and is at war with Russia.
Not a good move.
You know, and it adds up, and you mentioned some of the numbers.
It feels like $300 billion are involved.
That's a fair bit of change to deal with.
And Biden is all in favor of getting the Congress to act to make it look nice and neat and clean.
But it's interesting what Janet Yalen, Secretary of Treasury, says.
She's argued that Congress seizing funds was, quote, not something that is legally permissible in the United States.
But now they want to make it legal if we can just get the Congress to pass something.
That's where they draw their lines in the wrong places.
I mean, even if they can get away with, you know, pretending that, oh, we're a republic.
No, we're a democracy.
We'll take a vote.
Why Remotely Conservative Means War00:06:44
And they said it's okay to do this.
So that's how silly it is.
And that's why precise definitions of where you are and what you do when you go to war and when you shouldn't go to war and what is money, all these definitions.
And they're all based on lies.
And, you know, I call it an age of deceit.
And it's done on purpose.
And I think the deceitfulness is so incestuous that it is obviously very difficult to turn it off.
And because the people to combat it, they come back with the same technology.
That's why when you come up and occasionally get somebody like we have at least one out there campaigning and it sounds like he's telling the truth, you know, and that's that is what we need.
But the whole thing is, is get an endorsement by the majority.
And then it's okay.
It'll be legal and moral if you have that vote.
And so we'll see because I can't imagine the Congress passing that now, but I can imagine that the administration and the Federal Reserve and others can be willing to just ignore it too.
And they're not going to give it up.
They're going to keep fighting for their money back.
We've got to get our money back.
And there's repercussions because if the U.S. government sets a precedent that if you fall afoul of us, we will steal your sovereign money.
Well, then which country is going to invest in the U.S.?
Which country is going to want to partner with the U.S.?
Which foreign businesses are going to partner?
It shows that we're kind of a rogue actor overseas.
It does remind me that when you said that, I was thinking of that famous Nixon line.
Well, if the president does it, that means it can't be illegal.
That's what they're thinking.
But anyway, we're going to end on a little bit of a sour note, I have to say.
And we've been trying to be positive about the new speaker, but he did kind of a boneheaded thing yesterday.
Speaker Johnson pledges to stand shoulder to shoulder for defense of Taiwan.
I don't know.
He met with the leader of Taiwan recently and he said, hey, we're with you.
We're going to support you against Chinese aggression.
So.
You know, in the position over the years, it's been a pseudo-neutral position.
You know, we don't, it's a position that hasn't been in the face of China and not insisting, you know, that these countries be separate, and we've recognized that and got by.
But this type of talk means that we're antagonizing China, and it doesn't make for better relations.
And I still remember how impressed I was about when we went from the Korean War into an era of where things moved in a different direction.
And then Nixon, in a moment of sanity, said, you know, maybe it's better we just trade with China.
And it hasn't been that bad.
You know, at least we're not shooting and killing each other.
But this kind of stuff means that it could lead to this again.
So that's why I think it's an example to verify what the founders argued, that if you trade with countries, you're less likely to have war with them.
And if you have a war with them, introduce the whole notion of voluntary trade and limit ourselves.
But this stuff of majority rule, as long as you get majority support in the U.S. Congress, we can do anything we want.
And if you don't do it, you're unpatriotic.
That's their tool.
And that's a tool that we have to expose so the American people, I think, are becoming more aware of that.
But we have a ways to go because it's very easy to scare the people and say, especially, you know, if next week, if they sink an American vessel, you know, that is doing something illegally.
You know, you can change that in a few minutes because the people would be so determined for retaliation.
And it must be part of human nature because we don't have too many years or decades where you really live in peace with most of the world.
And unfortunately, we've moved in the wrong direction the past 10 years.
Yeah, unfortunately, it just shows that Johnson doesn't seem to be a serious person at this point.
Now, maybe he knows procedure well and what have you, although he's got his own rebellion that we almost talked about.
But it's terrible foreign policy.
It's neocon foreign policy, but it's also terrible economic policy.
I mean, how is it, using, taking some of the words from our old friend John Duncan, former representative from Tennessee, how is it in any way remotely conservative to pledge to defend Taiwan's borders when our own borders are being breached constantly?
Now, there's a lot of rhetoric from the Republicans about it, but what have they really done?
So how is it remotely conservative for him to be buddying up with Taiwan saying, we got your back, we'll defend your border.
We will go to war with China for the sake of this little island.
How is that remotely conservative?
See, I think they have an impossible situation because whether they're right, left, middle, or whatever we have in Congress, Doc, they basically endorse the principle of interventionism, that the government's there to intervene and make sure trade is fair and diverse and all that nonsense that goes on.
So they set that up.
But if you have, if both sides really believe in interventionism, it says whose interventionism should we live by?
And they pretend that there's a little bit of difference.
Today, people would argue with me if I say, well, basically, since they both endorse interventionism, the fact that body mics is a big issue, oh, it's certainly not not to do so well.
Well, yeah, there are some things.
Within the principles of interventionism, you can have a certain rate of taxes on our income and argue about it.
And some argue for more, some argue for less.
But maybe they should allow a better debate on how about an income tax of zero.
Then we would know exactly what we're talking about.
Who owns our income?
Who owns us?
And I would say modern day slavery has endorsed a principle where we just bow to the saints that are in Washington.
Well, here's a wake-up call to Speaker Johnson.
We lost a 20-year war to barefeet people in Afghanistan.
The U.S. would lose a war to China right now.
If anyone doesn't believe me, it's been wargamed by the military, by the Pentagon.
They know they would lose a war.
Looking At Constitutional Clarity00:02:54
We can't go, what, seven, eight, thousand miles away and have a war with the most populous state on earth.
It's impossible.
We can't project that kind of power.
So really, it's a fantasy world that we're going to defend this little island against huge China with its advanced weapons.
And it's stupid and it's unnecessary and it hurts us all.
So it's also probably a bigger fantasy than the one they had about we could take care of Russia.
So we lost that one.
Ukraine will have no problems with that.
But secretly, oh, it's not Ukraine.
It's NATO.
And think of the power of NATO.
The Europeans will come and invest all their money and troops and win this war against Russia.
Easy.
Instead of worrying about how do we build more or line pipelines and not let people blow them up.
Yeah.
Well, I'm going to close with a simple thing.
I'm looking here at our live viewers and I'm seeing 867 right now.
But when I look at how many likes we have, it's only 67.
A great way to help the show, and it won't cost you a penny, is just you're looking at us right now.
Just go to the like button and hit like.
I asked you once before and many of you responded, we got a lot more likes than we've had in the past.
Just go and hit like.
And if you look over here that doesn't say follow, hit follow as well.
We love your support, your financial support to keep us going.
But if you can't afford to or don't feel like it right now, you can give us a big boost by doing something very simple that'll take a half a second.
And thanks for watching.
Very good.
And I too want to thank our viewers for tuning in today and tune in on a regular basis because we strongly believe in these principles of liberty, free markets, sound money, and are totally convinced that if we're looking for peace and prosperity, there's only one direction to go in.
And it's not the direction that we're currently moving, but we are having more and more people waking up and say enough is enough.
There's too much government, too much taxes, too much interference in our personal habits.
And there's just way too much.
And the founders gave us a good outline on what we ought to do.
The truth is, is I think that we could do a better job and add some things now.
But it's so risky to say, oh, let's have a constitutional convention.
It would be if the right people got there, because there are some things in the Constitution that could be clarified.
But right now, that's the law of the land.
And there's a lot of lying going on about what the Constitution says.
Because guess what?
Everybody that has an official position in Washington, all the Congressmen, all the senators, they take this oath of office to obey the Constitution.
And look at the mishmash of what we have.
And I think, I don't know the number, but I bet you 85% of what is passed in Congress technically was not authorized and permitted by the Constitution.
We need to help change that attitude.
I want to thank all of you for the support you give us.