Category: News

Antiwar.com editorial director Justin Raimondo spoke today with Fox Radio’s Alan Colmes about the Bowe Bergdahl case.

Justin was at his best, check it out:

Justin Raimondo on Alan Colmes

This is the 70^th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy. It is a great blessing that western Europe is now at peace – regardless of how much political leaders squabble at the commemoration ceremony. D-Day back in the news reminds me of my first visit to World War Two venues.

In 1977, after dropping out of college, I hustled up the money to take off for a two-month hitchhiking tour of Europe. After landing and spending five days in Paris, I headed to the city’s western suburbs to catch a ride to Normandy.

Like most American kids in the 1960s, I loved TV series on World War Two – from Combat to Rat Patrol to Hogan’s Heroes. I was also transfixed by movies like “The Longest Day” (1962) and “Is Paris Burning?” (1966). I hoped to visit the landing sites, especially Omaha Beach – where the fiercest fighting took place on June 6.

But the hitching went badly. Perhaps French drivers were appalled by my use of a loaf of French bread to try to flag down a ride – like a giant thumb. (I avoided that flourish later in the summer when hitching in south France.) After several hours of strikeouts, I caught a ride with a trucker going to Le Havre, a port city fairly distant from the famous landing beaches. I had long since exhausted my meager French vocabulary, so I caught a boat to Southampton.

Continue reading “D-Day: My First Encounter with Hitler’s Sea Wall, 1977”

After five years of captivity in Afghanistan, has Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl been released only to spend the rest of his life in an American prison? Ron Paul wonders what it would be like if we had non-interventionist foreign policy. We haven’t had a Constitutional declaration of war since World War II. What if we had had no wars since then? Not only would it have saved countless lives in this war and those before it, but Americans prosperity would be intact. We wouldn’t have a VA health care crisis, since there would be so few veterans in need of attention. And some of the most warlike of cable TV’s talking heads would have nothing to talk about. Charles Goyette talks with Ron Paul on their Weekly Podcast about the strange case of Bowe Bergdahl.

Download MP3 here.

Charles Goyette is New York Times Bestselling Author of The Dollar Meltdown and Red and Blue and Broke All Over: Restoring America’s Free Economy. Check out Goyette and Paul’s national radio commentary: Ron Paul’s America and the Ron Paul and Charles Goyette Weekly Podcast. Goyette also edits The Freedom and Prosperity Letter.

“Assad’s days are numbered” – President Obama, February 2012

Living in denial is the easiest way to avoid hard truths, but it’s a horrible way for a government to conduct foreign policy. Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry recently scoffed at the elections in Syria, calling them “meaningless.” The U.S. media obediently agreed, while the rest of the world drew a much more realistic opinion. It’s true that an election during an ongoing conflict isn’t ideal for democracy, but the deeper truths exposed by the election were completely ignored by the US government and media.

Interestingly, few governments or media outlets doubted the Syrian election was fair for those who were able to vote. There were no large-scale allegations of fraud, and the numbers announced by the government were not seriously contested.

The results of the election weren’t a surprise to anyone familiar with Syrian domestic politics. Russian Television points out the two most obvious reasons Assad’s victory was assured:

1) The president never lost the support of his core constituencies – the Syrian armed forces, the government and business elite, the major cities, the minorities (Christians, Druze, Alawites, Shia, etc.) and secular Sunni (most of the 3 million members of the Baath Party are Sunni).

2) The opposition was fundamentally unable to present a cohesive front and a common political platform – this includes both domestic and external opponents – let alone rally behind a single candidate.

While ignoring these clear truths, John Kerry attempted to justify his characterization of the election as “meaningless,” by adding “…you can’t have an election where millions of your people don’t even have an ability to vote.”

Kerry’s point, although true, would hold greater weight if not for the fact that the Syrian Government controls all but one major city in Syria. Most of the Syrian rebel strength is in the less populated rural areas.

Therefore, it’s quite meaningful that 73 percent of eligible voters went to the polls and that 88 percent of them voted for Assad. Eleven out of 15 million apparently voted. And although one could likely poke further holes in the electoral process, the general sentiment in Syria found expression, the meaning of which was accepted by most of the world.

Continue reading “Obama’s Syrian Policy Vetoed by Assad Election Victory”

Blowing the whistle on wrongdoing creates a moral frequency that vast numbers of people are eager to hear. We don’t want our lives, communities, country and world continually damaged by the deadening silences of fear and conformity.

I’ve met many whistleblowers over the years, and they’ve been extraordinarily ordinary. None were applying for halos or sainthood. All experienced anguish before deciding that continuous inaction had a price that was too high. All suffered negative consequences as well as relief after they spoke up and took action. All made the world better with their courage.

Whistleblowers don’t sign up to be whistleblowers. Almost always, they begin their work as true believers in the system that conscience later compels them to challenge.

“It took years of involvement with a mendacious war policy, evidence of which was apparent to me as early as 2003, before I found the courage to follow my conscience,” Matthew Hoh recalled this week. “It is not an easy or light decision for anyone to make, but we need members of our military, development, diplomatic and intelligence community to speak out if we are ever to have a just and sound foreign policy.”

Hoh describes his record this way: “After over 11 continuous years of service with the U.S. military and U.S. government, nearly six of those years overseas, including service in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as positions within the Secretary of the Navy’s Office as a White House Liaison, and as a consultant for the State Department’s Iraq Desk, I resigned from my position with the State Department in Afghanistan in protest of the escalation of war in 2009.”

Continue reading “Memo to Potential Whistleblowers: If You See Something, Say Something”

The Obama administration deserves much of the blame for the failure of the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

It had originally been hoped that the United States would present a binding framework along the lines of what moderate Israeli and Palestinian political leaders had agreed to in unofficial talks in Geneva in 2003: Israel would recognize a Palestinian state based roughly on the pre-1967 borders with mutual territorial swaps, which would leave the Palestinians with 22 percent of historic Palestine and allow Israel to keep the remaining 78 percent; the Palestinian state would be demilitarized and all irregular militias disarmed; illegal settlements in occupied Palestinian territory near the Israeli border – encompassing close to 80 percent of the settlers – would be incorporated into Israel while settlers in the more remote settlements would be required to return to Israel; there would be no right of return for Palestinian refugees to Israel, but there would be international assistance in helping them resettle in the new Palestinian state; and some Israeli troops would remain along border crossings between the Palestinian state and its Arab neighbors, eventually to be replaced by international forces.

The Palestinian government agreed to these terms. Israel rejected them. Rather than make public this framework, and thereby hope the Israeli public would pressure its right-wing government to compromise, the Obama administration instead insisted that “both sides” had shown a lack of will to compromise.

An interview with an anonymous U.S. official close to the peace talks in an Israeli publication confirmed numerous other reports that, despite the Obama administration’s claims to the contrary, the Palestinian side made major concessions while the Israeli side essentially refused to make any, generally refusing to talk about any substantive issues.

A host of Democratic and Republican former officials – including a former national security adviser, secretary of defense, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, trade representative, and undersecretary of state for political affairs – went on record arguing that the Obama administration would have to challenge the Israeli government’s hard line towards the Palestinians in order for the peace process to be successful. Unfortunately, the White House apparently had no interest in doing so.

Continue reading “US Culpability in the Failure of Israeli-Palestinian Peace Talks”