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Oct. 28, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
30:35
Trump Administration Planning Panama Style Attack On Venezuela

We are hearing more and more about the "successful" Panama operation under President GHW Bush to "beat the Vietnam Syndrome" and re-start US interventionism overseas. This is to be the model for the invasion of Venezuela as well. Will they get away with it again?

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Neocons And Regime Change 00:11:48
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, welcome to the program.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Doing well.
Doing well.
We have a few things to talk about that's not doing well.
Yes.
And, you know, thinking about what's going on, you know, around the world and Venezuela and what the neocons are doing and how many people have lost their way even when they want to resist some spending.
But it looks to me like there might be a declaration of victory by the neocons.
I mean, we were hoping that they would be held in restraint, but it looks like they have been winning.
And when you see that the neocons are on the Sunday morning programs and all this, you have to wonder about it.
But Rand has, you know, some people would say, well, he's getting what he's deserved.
He's getting criticized.
Of course, we disagree with that.
And he stood out by saying about the bombing and the planes flying over and the provoking the Venezuelans into a war, it looks like.
Why?
What are they doing this?
So there are a few people, though, that are defending him, and that's great.
But I don't think he needs a whole lot of people.
I think he handles himself pretty well and defends himself.
But his big issue that got a lot of attention was when he criticized the bombing of these boats and killing people.
And he brought the attention to people that this was extrajudicial killings.
And people didn't like that.
So there was a gang of them led by people in the administration and elsewhere.
And it almost was like he was doing something treasonous.
But this is what it said.
You know, truth becomes treasonous in an empire of lies and made the living laws.
And some of the people who strongly supported Rand on some of the financial issues seem to have melted away, you know, either on spending and useless wars as well as spending in general.
So that to me is sad, but I think truth wins out in the end.
Sometimes it's painful and it takes a long time.
So that's what we're facing right now.
But he did receive a lot of hate from this episode.
And I think that this is an indication that they aren't going to just get rid of him from speaking out.
I think they're making his voice bigger and more, you know, more appropriate.
And that I think is good because that's the main thing we have to do is change people's mind.
But it looks to me like what has happened is that Trump has been able to accomplish something politically that is probably pretty astounding because we were softened up and thought he made an effort to work with libertarian thinking people.
And that seemed to be okay.
But he sort of galvanized everybody from the evangelicals to the neocons to the whole work.
So in a political sense, he has achieved a lot under the conditions of a lot of fear.
But the other thing, Daniel, that I think he's accomplished is burying some of the bigger issues.
Like, what's happening?
What's happening to our freedom of speech, our First Amendment?
And what is happening to a serious concern about the deficit?
You know, economics is, you know, problems are still the big issue.
People, right now, their biggest concern is the price of food.
And that's pretty universal.
Those aren't really dealt with right now.
But to start a new war, if you don't support it, you're unpatriotic.
And you've heard me say so often that we don't have a First Amendment so we can talk about the weather report.
We have the First Amendment because we are allowed and encouraged to criticize our own government.
Well, I think two things are happening here with Venezuela, and we've talked about it a lot because I think it's very important.
It's very clear that there are people in the administration who now are in the ascendance who want a war against Venezuela.
They want a regime change war.
And there's a lot of reasons I believe that is appealing to President Trump right now.
He's having problems in Ukraine, obviously.
He's basically fouled that up.
When he was inaugurated, he was on the two-yard line.
He could have just run it in for six, but he didn't.
He wanted to run around the entire other way and then come back to the touchdown line.
So he's got a problem there.
The Middle East piece, everyone knows, is hanging by a thread.
The ceasefire is violated every day by the Israelis.
That's not a lasting piece, even though he says it'll last for a thousand years.
There's not much there.
The economy, obviously, big problems at home.
He wants a quick win overseas so that he can point to a victory.
And what they're trying to do to achieve that is to conflate the 20-year plus, 20-plus-year, we would say failed, war on terror because terror won, right?
We have al-Qaeda in charge of Syria right now.
We have, you know, so that, but nevertheless, that feeling of the war on terror, now they're trying to transfer it to Venezuela.
Venezuela, Maduro is the new Saddam Hussein.
You have the WMDs are now fentanyl, right?
The same sort of thing.
He's running a criminal gang.
We've got to take him out.
And they're doing that while at the same time, drawing the nostalgia of what they believe, I guess they think Americans don't have a long memory, was a great successful little war.
And that was George Herbert Walker's Bush's attack on Panama and subsequent arrest of Noriega, who of course was a CIA, paid CIA agent officer to arrest him.
And so when you have some one person, what we're seeing now is Senator Rand Paul and a few others, but mostly Senator Paul is putting his neck out saying, hang on a minute.
This is not right.
This is not going right.
The first thing they're trying to do is provoke a war by blowing up all these boats.
And I go to the next one.
This is Kyle Enzelone over there at the Libertarian Institute.
And this was rant over the weekend.
Senator Rand Paul slams strikes on boats in the Caribbean as extraditic killings.
Go to that next clip, and here's a couple of things that Senator Paul said that are very important.
He said it on Fox News.
He said, because remember, Dr. Paul, the president said, yeah, I may go to the Senate.
I may give him a briefing.
I don't know.
You know, whatever.
So Senator says, a briefing is not enough to overcome the Constitution.
The Constitution says when you go to war, Congress has to vote on it.
The drug war or the crime war has typically been dealt with through law enforcement.
And so far, they have alleged that these people are drug dealers.
We've had no evidence presented.
So at this point, we would call them extrajudicial killings.
I'll go to the next one.
So far, they've alleged that these people are drug dealers, but no one has said their names.
No one has said what the evidence is.
No one has said whether they're armed, and we've had no evidence presented, he said.
That's the end quote from Senator Paul.
Kyle added this point, one survivor of a strike was released by Ecuador, finding out he was not engaged in wrongdoing when the boat was attacked.
One family member said a victim of U.S. strike was a fisherman and not working for a cartel.
Now, of course, they might say that.
Maybe it's not true.
But shouldn't we learn by now, after WMDs in Iraq and all this stuff, to not trust the government when they go on to go to war?
You know, you have to wonder what their ultimate goal is, because as you describe it, it sounds like they are trying to justify the war.
But why do they have to have a war against Venezuela?
But this has been going on.
Why did we have to have a war in the Middle East?
And I think the ultimate goal, and I believe we could find the evidence that maybe the people really pulling the strings, whether it's the military-industrial complex or whatever, that the goal is to change us into a military state.
And ICE has been a perfect tool for them.
That's true.
And if you don't agree, you're unpatriotic.
I mean, this is a tremendous deal, what they're able to do, because I'm annoyed by all these people coming in, but I think it's not quite like they describe it.
But it's also that it could have been prevented by just enforcing the laws, you know, and doing some other things, doing some prevention.
And don't reward people for coming in here illegally.
If you subsidize something, you get more of it.
And just think of the subsidies that gave to people coming in.
And I think the most absurd subsidy is that people who step across the line or call in by telephone are Americans are able to vote in our election.
It's suicidal.
But the military state is building.
If they do it with a patriotic zeal, then they can also hypnotize the people.
Because right now, the people are hypnotized to a degree, because we always see the opposition, the people who are having a difficult getting their message out that we don't need that.
And in one way, I think we've moved in that direction over Ukraine.
But in spite of the fact that the people are waking up, the politicians haven't awakened.
They're still doing it.
But I give Trump a lot of credit for being a political organizer, but I question his ultimate goals because some days, you know, it's back and forth.
I'm not sure what exactly they were and are now.
And he's made an effort to try to at least throw a bone to libertarians.
But right now, I'll tell you what, one of the other things that they achieve is looking away from the significant changes that must come when our system goes bankrupt.
And we're in the middle of the bankruptcy.
And, you know, the monetary system is in shambles.
And that would fit into the people who are looking for militarism and military takeover.
And that's why, once again, nobody, even those who helped Brown do some of the votes against spending, they're voting for all this stuff now, you know, for the wars and the domestic welfarism.
Yeah, I think President Trump probably doesn't want necessarily to do this regime change war.
The problem is he's not interested in a lot of details.
Narco Terrorists and Sugar 00:07:36
He's very, very susceptible to flattery.
And what's the neocon's one greatest ability, which is that is to flatter people.
Remember, they did that with George W. Bush, President George W. Bush.
They flattered him to high heaven to get him to do what they wanted.
I think Trump is probably even more susceptible than George W. Bush was.
So you can imagine how they're smothering him with flattery because what they really want, what Rubio has always wanted, is this war on Venezuela.
So anyway, here we have Pete Hegseph.
He had a long post on X talking about blowing up yet another boat.
And here's what he said.
I'll read some or most of it.
Yesterday, at the direction of President Trump, the Department of War carried out three lethal kinetic strikes on four vessels operated by designated terrorist organizations, DTO, trafficking narcotics in the Eastern Pacific.
Eastern Pacific?
Hold on a minute.
Anyway, that's not Venezuela.
That's somewhere else.
The four vessels were known by our intelligence apparatus, transiting along known narco-trafficking routes and carrying narcotics.
I highlighted that part because we don't know that they were carrying narcotics, and we're not going to take the word of the administration or any administration at face value.
Nevertheless, continues Hegseth, eight male narco-terrorists.
See how he continues to plug.
He's bad at propaganda, but he keeps trying to repeat it.
Eight male narco-terrorists were aboard the vessels during the first strike.
Four male narco-terrorists were aboard the vessel during the second strike.
Three male narco-terrorists were aboard the vessel during the third strike.
A total of 14 narco-terrorists were killed during the three strikes with one survivor.
All strikes were in international waters with no U.S. forces harmed.
Now, that's admitting, confessing to a war crime there.
Now, go to the next one now.
I'm reading this long thing because it adds up and it makes it, I think, very important.
Eight male narcoterrists were aboard the vessels during the first round.
Okay, so regarding the survivor, U.S. Southcom immediately initiated search and rescue protocols.
Mexican search and rescue authorities accepted the case and assumed responsibility for coordinating the rescue.
Now, here's how he justifies it.
The department has spent over two decades defending other homelands.
Now we're defending our own.
These narco-terrorists have killed more Americans than al-Qaeda, and they will be treated the same.
We will track them.
We will network them.
And then we will hunt and kill them.
This guy is out of central casting.
If they actually are like Al-Qaeda, Dr. Paul, they won't be treated the same because the U.S. has put al-Qaeda in power in places like Syria.
So I wonder what's going to happen when they look at statistics that show there's still a lot of people dying as a result of alcohol.
What if they decided, well, you know what?
Our diets are bad.
Well, they're already in that business.
What if they think sugar is bad?
We shouldn't have, we have to reduce the sugar consumption in this country by 90%.
Bomb the sugar factory.
Well, I think it did.
I think during World War II, sugar was rationed.
But it's just a real shame that this has happened.
But they have to describe the enemy as evildoers.
Remember this story is told in the Middle East war, what they were doing to babies.
Yanking them from the incubators, all a pack of lies.
But this was true in World War II, even before.
They had to, you know, it wasn't simple to get World War II going because some had precise purpose in doing this.
And they would define the enemy.
And it's back to where are they getting their information and who controls the information?
And that's a big deal.
Right now, I think, you know, the information is out there and they can be, you know, because right now, Trump's doing very well with this and he's getting support.
But I'll tell you, the information is the institution of spreading information is alive and well.
We use it and we get successes.
But just think of the others that have major successes.
So there's a contest out there.
We can't roll over and say, well, they do control the media.
They're the deep state and they control, they still control a lot of this activity.
And then when they do get political control, supposedly with an election, and they sort of fade away from what we were expecting.
Well, I clicked a couple of reactions to what Hegset said.
A couple of them are from people that I don't know.
One is from someone that I do know.
But I just, sometimes other people really have an interesting reaction.
I think this next one is spot on.
This is from a fellow called Matt Hannon.
I don't know who he is, but I think what he said is very, very important.
He says about what Pete Hegset said about killing the people on the boats, as the uproar dies and this becomes accepted, the administration will begin doing it over land.
And it will follow the same uproar and acceptance cycle.
Soon, U.S. citizens will be killed and will come to accept that too.
From there, why not bomb suspected drug dealers in their Iowa homes?
And that's a good point because that's how it happens once you take away civil liberties.
Now, go to the next one.
Another good reaction.
This is Ford Fisher, who I believe is a documentary filmmaker.
I don't know him personally, but I've seen his stuff.
He comments, Secretary of War Pete Hegset said Department of War has struck another boat in the Eastern Pacific.
While, quote, these narco-terrorists have killed more Americans than al-Qaeda, one lone survivor was apparently let go without apprehension or prosecution.
Well, I wonder why they didn't prosecute that drug dealer.
Now, the last one I have is from Brandon Buck, and he, I believe he is over at the Cato Institute, and I followed his work for a while.
I think he's a very astute observer.
And he comments on this one quote: these narco-terrorists have killed more Americans than al-Qaeda.
And he makes an excellent point.
Drug running isn't synonymous with flying planes into buildings and aspiring to build a global authoritarian caliphate.
And that's an important point.
Being a drug runner is not the same as flying your plane into a building, you know, and it is a good point.
No, it is.
And he's on the right track on trying to warn us about what's happening.
And there was this one little quote, but significant quote by an individual that was right about a federal immigration agent, this was in Chicago, cleaning out that mess, that pointed a gun at a U.S. citizen and made a threat and made a threatening remark during a protest in central Chicago's little village.
And he said that, oh, he pointed the gun.
The police officer, probably ICE.
ICE agent, yeah.
He said, he said, bang, said bang, bang, and you're dead, liberal.
Wow.
And I, well, verification, all that stuff, I still believe it.
But it's a militarization, yeah.
It's a militarization.
Bang Bang Militarization 00:05:20
But that's the kind of stuff.
Those are just tough words.
And, you know, well, I'll tell you what, the side that's annoyed by this, they want to totally control that.
That's an invitation to have more control of speech.
Yeah.
You know, with before you speak, you better get it approved.
Yeah, or bang, bang.
Well, the thing about this, you know, and I started out by talking about Panama, and this keeps coming up over and over and over.
And you know that it's something that's been designed somewhere as a propaganda narrative talking point when you start hearing it over and over.
And I actually, over the weekend, Lindsey Graham, who you know is heavily in the deep, heavily in the thick, Lindsey Graham, who President Trump is going to campaign for while he tries to get someone like Massey unelected.
Well, Graham was on the show.
Let's put on that one clip that we can watch.
Grab your earpiece if you can, Dr. Paul.
And listen, we want to do, this is a long clip.
I will warn the audience, it's a minute 48, but it's Lindsey Graham explaining how wonderful the Panama intervention was under George Herbert Walker Bush in 89.
Have a declaration to go into Panama.
Bush 41 went into Panama to replace the leadership there because the Panama leadership, Panamanian leadership, were working with drug cartels to threaten our country.
Reagan didn't have a declaration of war, congressional authorization, to deal with Cuban influence.
So this idea of Rand Paul, I just fundamentally disagree with.
To the other senators, you deserve more information and you're going to get more information.
But there is no requirement for Congress to declare war before the commander-in-chief can use force.
Panama and Brené are two examples in our backyard where Republican presidents chose to go after countries and leaders that were threatening our people.
But there seem to be a number of issues wound up in here.
I know you personally used to serve as a judge advocate in the Air Force.
We looked at the JAG manual.
Preventative self-defense employed to counter non-imminent threats is illegal under international law.
So if we are not at war and these suspected criminals pose no threat of imminent violence, isn't this potentially a war crime to be killing the people on these boats and then to be taking out a leader?
No, not at all.
I don't know what manual you're referring to, but I know what President Bush 41 did.
He took down Ortega, the leader of Panama, because he was involved in drug trafficking, threatening our country.
Venezuela is now partnering with Hezbollah.
Hezbollah is running out of money because Haran is weak.
That's not new.
Partnering with drug cartels.
Okay, we can take it out.
That smirk, first of all, is awful.
He doesn't need to go to Congress.
He doesn't need a declaration.
Well, his point that somebody else did it, and therefore it's okay.
The person that did it and violated the rules has changed the Constitution as if that justifies it.
Maybe they say pointed out, maybe they were doing the wrong thing.
Maybe they created the conditions now where executive orders run the country.
And it's being run by people who aren't bashful using power.
And it's a threat.
And one thing that people don't remember or even realize about Panama was that it wasn't a clean surgical operation.
The U.S. killed probably at least 3,000 civilians in that operation.
Now, I was going to do a second clip, but we're not able to get it going.
But Max Blumenthal posted a great clip from the day, from right after the war.
But Max said, after the illegal 1989-90 war on Panama under a phony anti-drug pretext, the U.S. military left mass graves of civilians across the country.
Many of the dead were children, and some bore signs of execution.
The U.S. regime is selling Panama as a model for its planned war on Venezuela.
And Max is absolutely right, as usual.
And the video, that's probably why they didn't want us to show it.
The video does show them digging out mass graves of civilians.
So thousands of people were killed.
In fact, when I was in grad school, I was in a class with an Air Force officer who was flying some of those missions.
And when he came back and came back to school, I hate to say it he kind of lost his mind because he said you would not believe the things I was forced to do when I was fired, when I was flying these fighters there.
So a lot of people, so they should not be able to pull the wool over history and say this was a clean operation.
It was not a clean operation.
And by the way, it wasn't Ortega, Mr. Graham.
It was Noriega, Emmanuel Noriega, the pineapple.
And he was a CIA informant, a paid CIA officer who they took out.
But it is dangerous.
And I'm going to do my last two clips because why did they go into Panama?
New Resolution: 100 Years On 00:04:52
Remember, you remember this well.
George Herbert Walker Bush was known as a wimp.
He's a wimpy guy.
He's a wimp.
Well, he wanted to do this because he wanted to show himself as a tough guy.
Now, here's an article, a contemporarious Arrhenius article.
This is from 91, right after the war.
After the war, White House memo, war introduces a tougher bush to the nation.
Go to the next one now.
This is, you remember this very well, Dr. Paul.
For now, Mr. Bush has a confidence.
This is New York Times.
For now, Mr. Bush has a confidence of a commander-in-chief who successfully gambled on an enormous political and military venture that, with less skill and less luck on the part of Mr. Bush and his generals, could have wrecked his presidency.
No more Vietnam.
Now, here's a quote from George Herbert Walker Bush after the Noriega attack.
By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all, he said today in a spontaneous burst of pride.
You remember that, Dr. Paul?
Instead of kicking it, he introduced it and tried to popularize it and make it acceptable.
And of course, that's been changing for 100 years, moving in that direction.
But I would say that wasn't very successful.
I don't think it was a very successful speech either, nor policy.
But they never weigh the real cost.
The cost to, well, first, the American citizen costing money and costing lives and costing family values when they draft these people and drag them around.
And then there's the budget cost, on and on.
And how many civilians were killed?
Well, they're starting to count, but they're using it.
They blew up these boats.
And it's sort of like they're bragging.
Oh, we killed four people there.
And they were drug dealers.
How do you know that?
Well, we don't know, but they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Yeah, exactly.
That sort of thing.
But that whole idea of acceptance, I think, is so bad because then the next time, if they kill 20, it doesn't matter much.
Oh, that's right.
They've justified.
They know where the enemy is.
But the people are pretty gullible.
And we just need to build our efforts to get people to at least look and study these issues before becoming determined.
And the only thing, the big thing that's happening is the bankruptcy.
They're knowing about this.
And they're knowing that the prices of food are going up.
But they need to know that foreign policy and domestic policy is the cause of all that pain and suffering because it alters, it alters the budget and alters the Federal Reserve and its rate of printing money.
And that's where our problems come from.
But if they don't accept that, It's going to get a lot worse and the market will settle it because people will give up on the dollar.
And they're giving up more on it now than everybody would dream because the stock market's real high at this particular moment.
Well, I would just say in closing that our viewers, you're going to get loaded with propaganda.
We remember it from the Iraq War.
You're going to get loaded with it.
And it's going to get a lot worse.
But it's time to stand on principles.
We don't say it often here, but call your senators.
Senator Paul and Senator Tim Kaine authored a joint Senate resolution invoking the War Powers Act to force a vote on whether the president has the authority, as Lindsey Graham claims, to just use the Army as his private little toys whenever he wants to invade.
That, I believe, it's Senate Resolution 40.
Just look it up.
It's the Kane-Paul resolution.
Call your senators and tell them to vote the right way, vote with the Constitution on that.
So over you, Dr. Paul.
And I might just add and try to clarify this.
The government can and have used force, but the Constitution is pretty clear that under the conditions of our country being attacked, like back then they were thinking about people marching in and taking over.
And a president can use force, but this has nothing to do with taking over Venezuela, Middle East, and thinking that we are responsible for the entire world.
And all that ever does is the empire gets too big, it falls apart, and a new one has to develop.
So that's what's happening now.
There's an attempt to formulate and plan for the new one.
And I think that is out there.
Understanding the New Empire 00:00:57
It's out there.
It's just a matter of trying to figure out what it's going to be like.
And so far, I don't think the libertarians are winning a whole lot on this.
And yet, I so strongly believe that our Constitution and our values would direct us toward freedom and liberty a lot more than the nonsense we've experienced and have watched coming out of Washington for the last 100 years.
So, but this is a time that we should consider and trying to understand this to the full extent because there's a lot of propaganda out there and people are motivated by that.
And the worst thing that you could be susceptible to is that if you don't go along with the gang, you're somehow being unpatriotic.
I say resist the authoritarians and that should be our patriotism.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today.
Do the Liberty Report.
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