Adam Dick

RPI Advisory Board Member Dennis Kucinich, interviewed this week on the Alan Colmes Show, emphatically argues against the United States military attacking ISIS. In particular, Kucinich explains that the US government is lying and manipulating fear to justify war on ISIS.

A big part of the US government’s trickery, Kucinich notes at the beginning of the interview, is that US “ally” Qatar is funding ISIS while the US government is bombing ISIS. Asked by Colmes what Kucinich, a two-time presidential candidate, would do regarding ISIS if Kucinich were “in power,” Kucinich responds:

Well, I’d start with having Qatar stop funding them. I mean, to me it’s not even credible that Qatar could be providing money to ISIS and the US spending $80 billion a year on so-called intelligence doesn’t know that.

Kucinich proceeds in his answer to note that Saudi Arabia was also involved in funding ISIS and that the US government funded ISIS indirectly through its funding of insurrectionists in Syria in an effort to overthrow the Syria government. Kucinich expands on this matter later, explaining:

But, if you know people who you call an ally are giving somebody who you consider a threat money, wouldn’t you pick up the phone and say “Stop”? There is no evidence in the years that [ISIS] was building that the United States made any effort to contact either Qatar or Saudi Arabia and say “Stop funding them.” As a matter of fact, I would not be surprised if the funding of these groups inside Syria was encouraged as the United States was handing out arms or making it possible for groups inside Syria to get arms without regard to identifying what their long-term ambitions were. As long as they opposed the [Syria] government, the US was for them.

Kucinich also takes on directly the widely repeated pro-war argument that the US government needs to attack ISIS to protect Christians. The sincerity of this motivation is keenly challenged by Kucinich’s observation that the “war against Christians in Syria” by ISIS and other groups that share the US government’s objective of overthrowing that country’s government “somehow escaped the US’ attention.”

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Eugene V. Debs nearly 100 years ago was a political prisoner in the United States for the “crime” of opposing the United States government’s participation in World War I and conscription of people to fight in that war. In March of 1919, the US Supreme Court, pointing to the Espionage Act of 1917 for justification, upheld Debs’ conviction by a trial jury and ten-year prison sentence for making antiwar comments in a June 16, 1918 Canton, Ohio speech.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote the Supreme Court’s short Debs v. United States opinion that upheld the conviction and ten-year prison sentence of Debs for two charges that Holmes described as follows:

This is an indictment under the Espionage Act of June 15, 1917… It has been cut down to two counts, originally the third and fourth. The former of these alleges that on or about June 16, 1918, at Canton, Ohio, the defendant caused and incited and attempted to cause and incite insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny and refusal of duty in the military and naval forces of the United States and with intent so to do delivered, to an assembly of people, a public speech, set forth. The fourth count alleges that he obstructed and attempted to obstruct the recruiting and enlistment service of the United States and to that end and with that intent delivered the same speech, again set forth.

In effect, Debs was incarcerated for exercising his right to free speech regarding two political matters — the US government choosing to participate in World War I and the US government using the draft to help fight that war. One may expect the justices to have reread the First Amendment to the US Constitution and promptly overturned Debs’ conviction. However, Holmes explains that a prior Supreme Court decision had already settled the inapplicability of Debs’ First Amendment defense.

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

KCRA TV is reporting that the Davis, California City Council voted Tuesday evening, after hearing from concerned people at the city council’s meeting, to get rid of the police department’s Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected military vehicle. The police department had obtained the MRAP, which is valued at nearly $700,000, for free recently from the US government.

Will Davis, California one day be seen as the beginning of a nationwide local government backlash against police militarization in the US?

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

You might think that, with the US government debt increasing year after year and bloated US military spending nearly equal to the combined military spending of the rest of the world, the US government would try to find a way to fight the Islamic State without increasing spending. Supposing the US government proceeds with further escalating yet another Middle East war, couldn’t President Barack Obama and Congress at least work together to pay the bill by transferring billions of spare dollars from elsewhere in the vast and wasteful US military and intelligence budgets? How about starting by canning the US government’s mass spying program?

If you are asking these sorts of questions, you obviously do not have the qualifications to serve as a US House of Representatives committee chairman overseeing the distribution of largess to the military-industrial complex.

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

In a Ron Paul Channel commentary on Wednesday, Ron Paul took issue with aspects of the August 7 New York Times article “Has the ‘Libertarian Moment’ Finally Arrived?” In particular, Paul argues that the article describes the growing influence of libertarianism wrongly when it pigeonholes libertarianism within the Republican Party. Instead, Paul explains, the crucial issue is Americans’ expanding understanding of libertarian ideas.

Paul explains that a shift toward libertarian ideas becoming dominant in America is arising from a change in the views of Americans and “has nothing to do really with the Republican Party.” The important battle, Paul explains, is between liberty and interventionism, not between Republicans and Democrats.

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.