It looks like this account was just created. The videos have been available for some time but in case you’ve not seen them, enjoy:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/…
President George W Bush has told the Israeli government that he may be prepared to approve a future military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities if negotiations with Tehran break down, according to a senior Pentagon official.
Despite the opposition of his own generals and widespread scepticism that America is ready to risk the military, political and economic consequences of an airborne strike on Iran, the president has given an “amber light” to an Israeli plan to attack Iran’s main nuclear sites with long-range bombing sorties, the official told The Sunday Times.
“Amber means get on with your preparations, stand by for immediate attack and tell us when you’re ready,” the official said. But the Israelis have also been told that they can expect no help from American forces and will not be able to use US military bases in Iraq for logistical support.
Nor is it certain that Bush’s amber light would ever turn to green without irrefutable evidence of lethal Iranian hostility. Tehran’s test launches of medium-range ballistic missiles last week were seen in Washington as provocative and poorly judged, but both the Pentagon and the CIA concluded that they did not represent an immediate threat of attack against Israeli or US targets.
“It’s really all down to the Israelis,” the Pentagon official added. “This administration will not attack Iran. This has already been decided. But the president is really preoccupied with the nuclear threat against Israel and I know he doesn’t believe that anything but force will deter Iran.”
The official added that Israel had not so far presented Bush with a convincing military proposal. “If there is no solid plan, the amber will never turn to green,” he said.
Sad they need permission.
Sad I can’t even come close to believing that this administration won’t attack Iran. Given the help we give Israel and the fact they ask permission… anything they do is just them acting as a proxy for the US government.
Where: North East Lawn, Washington Monument, Washington, D.C.
When: July 12th, 2008, 9:30AM
Route: Constitution Avenue.
9:30 AM Assemble on the North Lawn of the Washington Monument
10:30 AM Begin march down Constitution Avenue. Rally begins at 11:00 AM.
Rallying Point: West Side of Capitol Hill, begins at 11:00 AM.
Theme: The main theme of the March and Rally is Ron Paul’s message of Peace, Prosperity, and Freedom through adherence to the Constitution.
Confirmed Speakers:
The entire rally is supposed to be broadcasted live on RonPaulRadio.com.
You can catch their live stream here. http://ronpaulradio.com/listen.m3u
According to RevolutionMarch.com over 15 thousand people have pledged to be there. If half of that shows up it’ll be a success in my book.
The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”
Reduce, reuse, recycle.
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/…
Ron Paul gave a speech on the House floor today condemning the “virtual war resolution” soon to be considered by the House of Representatives. This bill already has 208 co-sponsors, and will likely be voted on after the 4th of July holiday. A related bill is being worked on in the Senate, with 29 Cosponsors. Many of the cosponsors are Democrats. Who says the Democratic Party is the anti-war party? You can see the video of Dr. Paul speaking out forcefully against this resolution here, sadly to a nearly empty House chamber.
It is time for Americans to join together against this insanity. Please take the time to understand your representative’s position on this resolution, and let him or her know that the American people do not want another war. Below is an unofficial transcript of Dr. Paul’s speech:
Libertarians call for increased communication to combat child pornography
The Libertarian Party is calling for increased coordination and communication between federal and state law enforcement agencies in order to help to apprehend and convict child predators and those who engage in child pornography.
“FBI Chief Robert Mueller was correct when he said we are losing the war on child pornography,” says Libertarian Party Executive Director Shane Cory, referring to comments made by the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday before a House Judiciary Committee meeting. “We have an obligation to protect children from sexual exploitation and abuse, and we can do this by increasing communication between state and federal agencies to help combat this repulsive industry. While privacy rights should always be respected in the pursuit of child pornographers, more needs to be done to track down and prosecute the twisted individuals who exploit innocent children.”
I tend to agree with Stephan Kinsella over at LRC:
While child abuse is obviously evil and unlibertarian, it is still bizarre that the LP would issue this release. To specifically call for the national police force to work more with state and local police is not just something radical libertarians would have trouble with. It is also unconstitutional. Under the Tenth Amendment, criminal justice questions–-including murder, rape, arson, theft, child abuse, violence against women, drug policy, gun laws and the like–are to be handled by state and local governments, not the federal government.
There is some gossip that this release was a stupid inner-party power play, to make radicals, including believers in decentralist law enforcement, feel uncomfortable in the party. By forcing this issue over the very emotionally charged issue of child porn, some people in charge of the party are trying to force anarchists and other radicals to admit they do not think the federal government should be involved in such questions. Specifically, they are attacking one presidential candidate, Mary Ruwart, over this and using it as an excuse to alienate radicals.
Ruwart–who spent 19 years as a pharmaceutical research scientist for Upjohn Pharmaceuticals and holds a PhD in biophysics–says she has been unfairly attacked and her words have been misrepresented in a smear attempt. Apparently the sell-outs and compromisers are trying to destroy her career.
In any case, why should a presidential election even have anything to do with this? The 1996 and 2000 LP presidential candidate, Harry Browne, used to point out that “The Constitution recognizes only three federal crimes — treason, piracy, and counterfeiting. The federal government has no Constitutional authority to deal with any other crimes.” He convincingly argued that this was a reason even pro-life libertarians should oppose federal abortion laws. (And Ron Paul would argue that pro-Choice libertarians, for similar decentralist, Constitutional reasons, might oppose Roe v. Wade.) (See Browne on prohibition and drugs; Browne on abortion.)
Would Harry Browne feel left out of what the Libertarian Party has become?
David Nolan, the minarchist founder of the Libertarian Party, was outraged by the press release. He wrote:
“The question is, how does society best protect its members from these bad things? And the LIBERTARIAN answer is ‘rarely, if ever, by giving more power to governments, especially at the Federal level.’ I am appalled at the national HQ staff putting out a press release that implicitly disowns one of our candidates over such a relatively minor issue. First, because that’s not a proper role for paid staffers to assume, and second because several other candidates have taken overtly anti-Libertarian stances on a number of issues, and none of them have been shot at by the national staff for doing so. This whole fiasco just reeks of cronyism and witch-hunting.”
This is why I hate political activism and electoral politics. The desperate attempts to seem respectable, the constant disingenuous smearing of more principled opponents as racists or pro-pedophiles, the selling out of even Constitutional government to hysterical federal wars on terrorism and child porn, and under-the-belt punches. It’s all very disgusting.
And even Ian Free Talk Live has had enough:
The Libertarian Party (LP) had, after the late, great Harry Browne’s campaigns, been falling further and further from it’s original principles. In the early portion of this decade, when the LP removed from the party platform their calls for the abolishment of the CIA and FBI, I wrote their newspaper to say I’d not send them another dime of money until they got back to their founding principle: the non-initiation of force.As I drifted away from the LP and politics and toward market-based action, I paid less and less attention to the LP. I even said on the air recently on “Free Talk Live“, my talk show, that the only reason I was still a member is because I bought a life membership and it hadn’t been worth my while to cancel it.
Well, along comes this post on the LRC blog. I agree with the sentiments of the post, and felt this move by the LP was the last straw. I called and revoked my membership, and felt clean and fresh afterward!
The LP is dead to me and no longer resembles the party I joined ten years ago. After the 2000 Browne campaign, I jumped into LP activism. I attended meetings regularly and single-handedly organized and paid for libertarian outreach at the county fair, gun shows, and gay/lesbian pridefests as well as created and tended their website. I did and funded it all myself because of the political nature of the LP. It was not hard to notice how bureaucratic and slow they were. For example, they spent uncountable weeks debating over bylaws. Plus, at the non-bylaw-reviewing regular meetings, whenever an idea was proposed there would nearly always be someone who would derail the discussion into debate on the idea or the issue. Very little ever got done. This was just my experience with the local LP in Florida. (Nothing against the individuals, they are good people. It’s the central planning that is the major failure.)
The LP state conventions I attended were dull. Having watched the LP national conventions on TV, I can say that while some of the speeches were excellent, the bulk of the time was spent bickering over party platform, blah blah blah. I’m glad I never went to one. All of this distasteful bureaucratic, political garbage was frustrating to me, as I didn’t know what else to do to achieve liberty in my lifetime.
Since I discovered the Free State Project in the first half of the decade and especially since moving to New Hampshire, I’ve been learning about the free market and experiencing REAL, decentralized, activism. Sure, there are a bunch of political Free Staters (for those of you who still believe you can change the system from the inside), but the most exciting and effective activism has been market-based. There’s a cadre of great market-based activists (both NH natives and Free Staters) here in Keene, NH, and that number is growing. We’re creating our own media (TV, radio, print, blog) and have begun living free. If the Blue Light Gang interferes, we already have proven success at deterring their aggression. As more join in withdrawing from coercive society and joining the voluntary society, we will only be more successful as the coercive gang’s veil of legitimacy will crumble from its own inherent contradictions. Eventually, the transition to the free market will be completed and not one vote need be cast or politician promoted.
Goodbye LP. Their contribution to the dilution and destruction of the term Libertarian is appreciated. “Free Marketeer” is so much more descriptive of my beliefs. Thanks LP, for helping me realize that politics is never the solution to problems.
We will never be free by begging, but only by choice. I choose liberty. What about you? Will you join the Nonviolent Evolution?
I think the means to freedom is multifaceted. We need political and apolitical actors. If we don’t defend ourselves in both spheres we risk serious loss of ground. However, party politics will not be the vehicle for change. As you see here the “party of principle” has been infiltrated by rejected Republicans and Democrats. Mike Gravel, Bob Barr and Waine Allen Root may be better than your average D and R politician but that’s not saying much. This latest attack on Mary Ruwart has really turned me against the LNC moreso then I had been prior. The outright lies and slim being thrown around at Third Party Watch and the like is incredibly petty and sad.
The national LP will likely continue to run candidates who blow the competition away for some time but they will also likely continue to pick up D and R rejects and their downward spiral. Oh well…. one more reason to head up to NH.
