All Episodes
Previous Next
March 7, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
29:36
'Not Our Fault!' - Pentagon Blames CIA For Yemen Fiasco

Yemen is not going as promised. After weeks of US and UK bombing, the Red Sea is still effectively off-limits to US and UK shipping and to all shipping to and from Israel. Yemen's Houthis announced the policy in protest of Israel's slaughter in Gaza. Recently the Pentagon blamed the CIA for the failed Yemen policy, claiming they were lacking in intelligence. Also today: Fatal flaw in Ukraine war and Daniel Hale is out of jail.

|

Time Text
Yemen, Ukraine, and Israel's Red Sea Concerns 00:14:38
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you today.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you today?
Good.
Good.
We're going to do good?
I hope so.
A couple of suggestions.
We'll have to describe our philosophy.
We're for less government, not more government.
That's right, that's right.
We're for sounder money, not more fiat.
That's right.
Less debt.
A lot of things.
But they're not even hardly talking about that.
They just go on and on.
Their technicalities.
So we'll have to talk about some of the technicalities and foreign policy.
This one, we've touched on this one, Yemen and that problem over there.
But this headline on the cradle says, the Pentagon blames the Intel Gap for failure to stop Yemen's Red Sea operation.
Does that mean the Pentagon's confessing?
You know, I don't think they do that very often.
But at times, somebody comes along and admits, you know, most of the time it's a justification to get more of the same stuff and change it around.
But anyway, the failure started the day we went in there, and we've been in there more than one day or one year.
We've been messing around there for years, and it was bound to happen.
And we had to deal with the Saudis and work all that out and the whole mess over there.
So everybody said, surprise, why do we have so much trouble?
Oh, it's the Pentagon.
They slipped up.
There was one guy.
We'll put him in jail whoever messed up on the intelligence.
But I would say the whole principle is not intelligent.
And that the activity they're doing is not intelligent.
And when you get into who does what and why, you find out that some people are praised for doing the same thing and they get promoted and other people go to prison under these circumstances.
So this is a shame.
But the Pentagon has to explain themselves.
How did they mess up?
How did they misjudge this?
And what are they going to do about it?
That is the spot.
I'm not very optimistic that we're going to have a great answer by tomorrow morning and we're going to move the troops out like we should.
Well, it's Operation Prosperity Guardian.
We can put up this link.
From the cradle is the article.
It's a good publication, definitely worth looking at.
As you say, Dr. Paul, Pentagon blames Intel Gap for failure to stop Yemen's Red Sea operations.
And just to backtrack a little bit, you know, we had October 7th, the Hamas attack, and then we had Israel's counterattack.
And then all of a sudden, we see that Israel is not just going after Hamas.
Israel is basically flattening Gaza and killing 30,000 Palestinians.
Well, Yemen didn't like that.
The people in Yemen didn't like that.
The leadership didn't like that.
So they said, okay, the Red Sea is closed to shipping going to and from Israel.
We're going to close down the ports.
This is the way that we are going to do what we think is right to protect people who are suffering humanitarian catastrophe, which is pretty objectively the case.
And so this is an example of the U.S. reaction.
Oh, yeah, well, we're going to start bombing you, which is exactly what the Biden administration did.
They didn't go and ask them, okay, do we have a plan?
Do we know everything we need to know?
No, it just bombs away.
And so what you have, and actually it's even worse than you're saying, Dr. Paul, because the Pentagon guy came before Congress and said, don't blame us.
It was the CIA.
They didn't give us any intelligence.
We thought everything was going to be fine.
And put up this next clip.
This will tell you what they were saying.
They said U.S. defense officials have blamed insufficient intelligence for Washington's abortive airstrike campaign against Yemen, which started mid-January and has so far failed to deter the Yemeni armed forces from attacking U.S., UK, and Israel-linked vessels in the Red Sea in support of Palestine.
So initially, it was only just about Israel-linked vessels.
But then the U.S. and U.K. started bombing Yemen.
They said, okay, we're going to mess with your vessels too.
But it turns out, by starting this bombing, this is just an example of this sort of war should be the last resort, but with the U.S. government, it's always the first resort.
So they start a bombing.
It's not working at all.
And now they're saying, well, we just didn't know that much about them.
Then they opened the door for questions.
Did he do it on purpose?
What serves their interests?
Well, building more bombs, you know, and showing how dangerous the world is.
But the one result of this is something that is very predictable.
And it says the Yemeni leaders maintain that no amount of hostilities will deter us from continuing their Red Sea expeditions.
Yeah, and that's the thing.
It happens all the time.
It's failing to understand that they believe they're acting in their interests and they will do whatever it takes.
We always have this idea, oh, they're bluffing, Putin's bluffing, everyone's bluffing.
They'll bow down to us.
Sometimes they don't.
You know, during the 60s, we had to deal with Vietnam, and then there was the tragic ending of many lives lost and us losing.
And then there was a Vietnam syndrome that the American people became a little bit more leery.
And of course, George Bush came along and said, I've removed that.
Now we've had a great victory in the Middle East.
But they never learned a lesson.
Even the American people aren't even that interested anymore.
Is that when you go in, unnecessarily getting involved, not with the proper procedures like declaring war and explaining to the people what it is, and maybe having intelligence tell you this isn't worth the effort.
They don't want the intelligence.
If I tell them they shouldn't do it.
This is what you should expect.
You know, every once in a while people ask me, say, how did you know that was coming?
And I don't think it takes a genius to figure out if you do dumb things, there will be some dumb results, and you're going to suffer from it.
You can't start dropping bombs on people and saying, we've contributed to peace and prosperity in the world, and now we have a balanced budget at home and more for liberty.
No, they never think in those terms.
And the world has changed.
They haven't seen it.
I mean, warfare is now asymmetric.
You know, you have Yemen, which is hardly a world power.
It's hardly, you know, an economic power or a military power.
But they use asymmetric resources, just like the Russians have deployed in their war in Ukraine.
They've used, you know, and Ukraine is using as well, drones, and et cetera, et cetera.
The world is changing.
And they don't see it.
Put on this next round.
This is from the same article.
During a congressional hearing on U.S. operations in the Red Sea last week, U.S. Assistant Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for West Asia Daniel Shapiro revealed that Washington, quote, did not know the full capacity of the Yemeni arsenal used for its operations in the Red Sea, adding that the White House was, quote, working to gather that intelligence.
Now, you would think, how much did we spend on our intelligence?
Only the part that we know is hundreds of billions.
Of course, the black budget, I'm sure, is many more times that.
So all of this money being spent, and you did not know what you were facing when you walked into war?
Why didn't they look at their receipts?
Yeah, really.
You know that they just didn't pop out of the air or they didn't buy them from somebody.
You know that the American taxpayer somehow or another, you know, there was a little bit of, you know, milking the money around the system, the international organizations, but they end up getting the money.
I don't think Yemen had the money to buy all those things.
But it's the darn policies that they have, the overriding policies that we have this authority and it's all very good.
We do it in the name of peace and prosperity.
And I can understand the frustration of the American people today because it's getting worse and worse and worse.
And they're realizing what bankruptcy might look like.
But the whole thing is, we should have learned a long time ago.
And I don't know whether they've learned their lesson now.
It's just they're sick and tired of it.
They might want, it's sort of like somebody is getting poorer and they have less money because of inflation.
Well, give me more money.
And they don't look and say, well, where'd the inflation come from?
Where does the inflation of these tragedies internationally come from?
It usually comes from a tyrannical government.
It usually comes from somebody that's running an empire and can direct it.
And it usually comes from countries that has control of the monetary system.
I don't know who that might be, but you know how it works.
But you should at least know the capabilities of your adversary if you're planning war.
And here they're saying, well, we just didn't know.
We didn't have any.
We just thought it was this poor country.
May as well bomb it.
It's just a crazy way of doing things.
And let's look down.
This is a quote from the defense minister of Yemen for the Houthis.
And here's what he said.
He's very clear.
The U.S., Britain, and Israel must realize that the policies of demarcation and assertion of hegemonic influence on international waters are obsolete and no more favorable.
As long as the Zionist atrocities continue in Gaza, we will continue our operations against the usurping entity.
That's what he said at the end of February.
So they're very clear what they're doing and why they're doing it.
Instead of considering their motivations and whether they may or may not be justified and to make adjustments accordingly, instead we jump in with two feet and add more weapons, more fuel to the fire in Israel, and it gets worse.
So here's a couple of examples I just pulled up out of Twitter.
This is actually from just yesterday, if you can put this next one up.
The Houthis have hit and may have sunk True Confidence, an American cargo ship in the Gulf of Aden.
The militant group is attacking Israeli and Western ships near Yemen as a retaliation for genocide in Gaza.
So they hit an American ship just yesterday.
It looks like it might have gone down.
We remember last week we talked about the next one.
This is a British ship.
If you put that next one on, I think this was just last week they hit this.
The Empire of Lies on Twitter says on X says, how's that U.S. Operation Prosperity Guardian against Yemen going?
And then he says, correctly, pretty much like every other U.S. military misadventure in the 21st century, a total humiliation and failure.
And you see the picture here is of the very last little piece of that British cargo ship.
You know, there's not much to do if they tried to draw a learning curve because what they say, we bomb more, we get more involved, and we create good things.
No, the more you do this, the less you get of all this.
And that's what's happening.
And the denial is unbelievable.
You know, how people can ignore it, deny it, and just let the people who run the show.
Then we end up with a system of government that is so divisive because the justice system falls down too.
Some people get put in prison for saying something, and some people get elected to higher office for getting involved and presenting these wonderful answers to these problems around the world.
Well, we didn't know.
I guess a dog ate my homework.
I don't know.
I don't know what's going on over there.
We could be intelligence officers.
I don't know what's going on.
Anyway, let's move on to the next one.
Now, you noticed this this morning.
It's a very interesting article, a very interesting article.
We saw it on Zero Heads.
We published from Alex Kraner's Substack.
If we can put that first one up, because you were just talking about systems a second ago, the Ukraine War and the Western Systems Fatal Flaw.
It's a very interesting article pointing out why the Ukraine, it talks about Ukraine's imminent capitulation to Russia.
Ukraine will not win, Russia will win, and it's because of a fatal flaw in the system of how we approach the military and how we approach defense and paying for it in the U.S. and in the West in general.
Well, what caught my attention, and this is just an assessment by me.
I can't prove anything.
But we talked about Marco Rubio yesterday, and he had a different appeal.
He really didn't think we could win the war from the beginning.
I didn't understand his excuse for everybody, but it was insane.
So that was the case.
So I thought, well, there's two things there.
Yesterday we talked about Rubio sort of throwing in the towel, and then we have these people come on and they're getting articles like this.
This is, I think, enlightening, but it doesn't enlighten the right people.
It just builds more determination on their part because what we see is stupidity and why did they do that?
And there's plenty of that to go around.
But there's also, you know, people that that's their policy and they hope they can get away with it.
And they do get away with it.
And they get their support from the media.
And eventually, though, why in recent months now, I've become more optimistic because I think the alternative now to the mainstream media has improved tremendously.
It's still a mess.
You know, we've complained a lot about the social media and working with the government.
But there's some social media that's not interested in working with the government.
So I think the technology is out there to try to wake people up to this.
And that's when they're going to panic.
Matter of fact, I think there's some of that panic going on right now because the opposition to the principles we stand for getting louder and louder.
Yes.
Well, you talk about Rubio.
I mean, it epitomizes the problem because essentially what he said, and we talked about it, is, I knew all along that Ukraine couldn't win, but I didn't want to say anything because I didn't want to discourage, essentially, I'm paraphrasing, I didn't want to discourage us from getting involved in it, i.e. spending $100 billion giving it to Ukraine.
So I knew it wouldn't work, but I think we had to spend the money anyway, is basically what he's saying.
But nobody seems like in the administration, it seems like somebody should jump on that.
But I think one article and we talked about it.
Yeah, what a shame.
Yeah.
Well, here's part of what they're saying in this piece that we're talking about.
If you go to the next one, because he says the West can outspend Russia 10 to 1 on military.
Panic Over Spending 00:05:51
Well, it better.
Because it says one of the talking points by the true believers in our military might is that we can outspend Russia by a factor of 10 to 1 in military expenditures.
The article says that may well be true, but what those expenditures can actually buy is a different matter.
They say, yeah, we better spend 10 to 1 just to keep up.
The next he says in the article, as the New York Times reported in September, now this is astonishing.
I had not seen this in print, Dr. Paul.
Russia is producing at least seven times more ammunition than the U.S. and its Western allies combined, and is producing it at about one-tenth the cost of Western manufacturers.
For example, the article states, while the cost per round for a Russian 152 millimeter round is about $600, NATO must budget between $6,000 and $8,000 per each 155 millimeter round.
So 10 times or more for each round that we spend.
And they talk a little bit about how this money's being spent.
This is almost like the marketplace working.
You know, there's competition out there.
It's a competition now, not for some type of goal, political goal, promoting countries or saving liberty or something like that.
It's merely now turned into what we've always said it was.
It's profiteering.
In a way, it's spreading around.
They've learned to, the invisible hand.
They put the money here, and we have this monopoly on it, and now we're getting poorer, and all of a sudden, somebody else is going to make the weapons.
So that's a sign of bad things to come.
And it's a problem with the growth of the military-industrial complex, because if you go to the next clip, you're right.
This is exactly what the article said, and it really caught my attention too.
Russia, and I think China probably to a degree, and this is not necessarily to praise them, but their military spending is purpose-driven.
But the American system is profit-driven.
And he says there's no match between the two.
He quotes Brian Berledic, someone I've known for a long time, actually.
He's a former Marine.
But Brian Berledic talks about many of the reasons why the combined West is now clearly losing the arms race, not only against Russia, but also against China, is that while Russia's defense industry is purpose-driven, that of the West is profit-driven.
And we know this because we see the revolving door between military officers and cushy jobs in the military-industrial complex.
You double-dip, you're a general, you get out, you get your massive pension, plus you make a half million or probably more a year working for Lockheed Martin, what have you.
The whole system is corrupt because then you argue for more war.
So war is a sort of self-perpetuating machine rather than how many missiles do we need to deter our enemies.
You know, there's a market effect here because people are being rewarded for doing bad, you know, building weapons and gouging the taxpayer.
But they're very blunt about it.
It says, Western military-industrial complex is entirely structured around profit, like you say, profit objectives, which created a perverse system of incentives that rendered its output ineffective in more than one way or another.
So it's not even accomplished.
Matter of fact, they claim this is making us safe and we're bringing about peace.
The truth is, all this mischief is making us poorer and more vulnerable and less free.
And people don't want to listen to that.
No.
Well, I want to correct that.
There are a lot of people who do it, but our numbers just aren't big enough yet.
But it's just like our friend Chuck Spinney said, and I know that he spoke at one of your lunches.
I've known him for 25 years or so.
He spent an entire career at the Pentagon saying just that.
We spend a ton of money for stuff that doesn't work because the system is broken.
And he got on the cover, I think, of Newsweek for doing it in the 80s, but it didn't fix the system.
So here we are.
I do want to say one last quote from the article because I really like this.
I'm sure other people have read it.
It's nothing new.
But it's a quote from Napoleon Bonaparte.
Maybe you saw this.
If you can put that last one up.
He says, as Napoleon Bonaparte put it, wars happen when your government tells you who the enemy is.
Revolutions happen when you figure it out for yourself.
So I thought that was kind of a clever statement.
So when are things going to change?
They're not going to change until there's a renewal in the understanding and a desire to live in a peaceful world designed by individual liberty rather than powerful governments.
Because the more powerful the government is, the more the money and the wealth is manipulated.
So they get control of the national defense organization, the national security, and then the military, and then the monetary system.
And when a great country like ours has been gets hold of that, they have a span of time where it can last for a good while, consuming wealth.
And they can get away with it because people are fooled into it.
They think what we're able to do is production for good things.
No, we're consuming it because people are willing to take our debt.
You know, when they give up on our debt, this will end.
So it's artificial.
You know, even though we still are the most powerful government in the world, but if we don't know how to use it, we're not going to last too long.
I know I mentioned the 60s too often, but the 60s are where all that money was spent and spent and spent.
And socially here at home, there was nothing but chaos.
And the military was out of control.
And then they came along and they said, oh, we'll fix that.
We'll start winning these wars.
Daniel Hale's Whistleblowing 00:07:53
Sure.
Well, let's finish up with some, I would call it good news, bad news.
Okay, the good news is that Daniel Hale is out of jail.
The bad news is that he was in jail in the first place.
He spent 33 months, I believe, locked up in prison, charged under the Espionage Act.
And what did he do?
Well, he had some classified documents and he blew the whistle on the U.S. drone program, the fact that it was killing more civilians than it was killing bad guys.
And he told the journalist about it and showed them some documents on that and was thrown into the slammer.
Now, he wrote an article in Al Jazeera, published it recently.
Thanks to our friends at antiwar.com for running it today.
So we've got a look at it.
He makes a very good point.
Actually, he makes three good points in this article.
Put on that clip so we can see the headline.
The first very good point is the headline itself.
I was punished under the Espionage Act.
Why wasn't Joe Biden?
So, and he makes a point that he did literally, if you go to the next one, he did literally what Joe Biden did.
He spent 33 months for violating the Espionage Act after he disclosed classified information.
If you go to the next one, he said he was happy that Biden wasn't prosecuted under the Espionage Act, but he can't figure out why he was.
And he says, according to the special counsel's report about Biden's situation, he said, I found, I was curious to the similarities between my case and the investigation of the president.
According to the report, Biden kept classified information outside of a secure facility at his home and office, as did I, he freely admits.
The president later spoke to a reporter about the classified information he retained.
Again, as did I, Daniel Hale writes, he says, both President Biden and I expressed to our respective reporters the concerns we had about official U.S. policy.
His, i.e. Biden's, about the failed 2009 surge in Afghanistan when he was vice president, and mine about the consequences of that policy.
So why the decision to prosecute one and not the other?
Because there are two-tiered systems of justice, and we're facing up to that.
And American people are realizing it not so much under this context because they don't hear enough about it, but they hear more about our political system.
All of a sudden, you know, they find out that somebody in one party, they get off scot-free and they get sympathy because they're a drug addict.
They can't punish somebody that's a drug addict.
So it's this two-tiered system that is so clear now that it's the whole thing.
It used to be that if you're having a problem, call the police and call the FBI and get some help immediately.
And it's almost to the point where people are starting to be a little bit worried about that because it doesn't pay off.
Like in a store, the kids are robbing, the mob's robbing.
If you call them and you have a gun and you say, get out of my building, you're going to get arrested.
It's just terrible.
And they don't deal, they deal in a world of lack of principle, and their principle is no principles at all.
Yeah.
Well, I think it was interesting, I think, about this article were the three things.
First of all, the lopsided justice, which you so well articulated just now, the lopsided system.
The other one is the futility, the horrible, the counterproductiveness, the counterproductivity of the Espionage Act itself.
And he didn't add it in here, but we would add that Assange is now they're trying to charge him, charge him under our Espionage Act, the terribleness of this 1917 bill in the first place.
And then the substance of his case, the fact that he spent three years of his life in prison because he alerted the American people that they are paying for a drone program that's killing innocent people, 10 to 1 against killing the bad guys.
I think that's something in the public interest to know.
But, you know, the people in power didn't want us to know that because we might rise up against the war machine.
You know, sometimes it's so bad, it's unbelievable.
People say, I know we have problems, and we know they do things.
But we couldn't be that horrible because I've experienced that way back.
Because when I started reading about the possibility of us planning and not trying to avoid World War II, I said, it's impossible.
That's inconceivable that they wouldn't do everything possible to stop the war.
But after a time, and the more I read and the more I read of it, the more I was convinced that the strategy wasn't that they wanted to start doing evil, that it was necessary to save all the goodness of us.
So we had to end up with showing we had nuclear weapons that killed a few people.
Yeah.
Well, I wanted to read the last little part of Daniel Hill's article, and it's worth reading.
You can link to it on anti-war.com and find it there.
But I found it touching.
I found it moving.
I found it very sad.
If you put this one on, go to the next one, please.
So here's Daniel Hill.
He was working in the drone program.
He said, all told, the guilt I professed for willfully delivering national intelligence, national defense information to a journalist was nothing compared to the immense shame I felt for willfully participating in the drone program.
In 2021, scarcely weeks after I was sentenced to federal prison, Zamari Ahmadi and nine members of his family, most of them small children, were the victims of a mistaken U.S. drone strike.
The Pentagon called it a righteous strike before the truth forced them to quietly back away and conduct an internal investigation in which it was found no one to be at fault for the innocent lives that were taken.
So they investigated, found themselves innocent, but also the innocent children that were killed in the strike.
Thousands of them.
It's not very often that we have somebody come up and tell the truth on this.
But this effort, it should be decided sooner.
They launched the wrong weapon at the wrong people and it was such a tragedy.
And we're recognizing the suffering goes on and on.
But really, it's getting involved.
The human race is very friable in the sense that we all make mistakes.
So they get in there and they argue.
Then they get convinced because they control the media and the weaponry and all the money and the universities and all the propaganda.
And then they do it.
So, yeah, the tragedy is they killed innocent people.
But the big tragedy is, why did we do it?
And I think he makes that point.
He says, I should have never been part of that.
He all of a sudden wakes up and I was part of that.
So it's a tragedy.
It's terrible.
Well, I'm ready to close out.
And I don't want to forget to thank Downing Thomas.
He kicked in 20 bucks today to help us keep the lights on.
We appreciate your support.
We appreciate everyone's support about whether you can kick in some money, that's fantastic.
Or just by watching the show.
And here's something you can do for free.
Just click like, whether you're watching us on Rumble or YouTube or wherever.
And if you're not subscribed to our channel, wherever you see it, please do subscribe to it and follow us and recommend us to others so that we can continue to provide information that's a little bit different than you're going to see elsewhere.
So thank you for watching over you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
And I too want to show how grateful we are for our viewers because in spite of the fact that we don't change the world overnight, we believe that we contribute something moving in the right direction.
And that's a big deal as far as I'm concerned.
A Long Way From Pure Democracy 00:01:01
And I think our numbers seem to be small, but they're a lot larger than a lot of people realize.
So the effort is out there, but to me, it's philosophic and getting people and a moral standard that we must have.
I think the founders of this country weren't perfect, but they understood it better than anybody else that put a document together.
So I think that there's reason for us to be hopeful, but we have to know what we're defending.
And if we're defending, you know, pure democracy where all I have to do is get a bunch of people together, 51%, we can do anything we want.
That is a long way from what democracy is all about.
And individual liberty is what we want to go for.
And we have to realize this is a moral system that is based on understanding what a higher law is that should rule over all the nonsense we get from government.
So we try to follow those principles.
And fortunately, we have a lot of friends, but we still have a lot of work to do.
But I do want to thank you for tuning in each week.
Export Selection