Tag Archives: anti-terrorism

The Anti-Terrorism Screws Tighten on the American People, by Jacob G. Hornberger

Posted on February 18, 2021 | Leave a comment

There’s always terrifying terrorists somewhere to terrify people into handing their freedom to the government on a silver platter. From Jacob G. Hornberger at ronpaulinstitute.org:

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According to a recent article in the Washington Post, in the aftermath of the January 6 melee at the Capitol there are increasing calls for the US government’s Department of Homeland Security to “play a more muscular role in combating domestic extremism.” The article points out that up to this point, DHS has been “responsible for securing the country’s borders, ports, transportation and cyber systems, generally leaving the monitoring of extremist groups and terrorism investigations to the FBI.” But since “DHS and its agencies have nearly eight times as many employees as the FBI,” the idea is that they should be called upon the play a bigger domestic role.

When I first heard the term Department of Homeland Security back in 2001, I immediately thought about Nazi Germany. Indeed, doesn’t every totalitarian regime have a Department of Homeland Security”?

One thing is for sure: Americans didn’t have a Department of Homeland Security when the country was established. And it didn’t have one for the next 200 years. In fact, the concept is so creepy and so anti-freedom that there is no doubt that if the Constitution had authorized a Department of Homeland Security, our American ancestors would never have approved the Constitution in the first place.

Another thing is for sure: The Constitution has never been amended to authorize a Department of Homeland Security. So how is it that the American people are saddled with this totalitarian-like agency today?

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Politics, Propaganda, Psychology

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U.S. Humanitarian Aid Going to ISIS by Jamie Dettmer

Posted on October 20, 2014 | Leave a comment

By Jamie Dettmer at The Daily Beast

Not only are foodstuffs, medical supplies—even clinics—going to ISIS, the distribution networks are paying ISIS ‘taxes’ and putting ISIS people on their payrolls.

GAZIANTEP, Turkey—While U.S. warplanes strike at the militants of the so-called Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq, truckloads of U.S. and Western aid has been flowing into territory controlled by the jihadists, assisting them to build their terror-inspiring “caliphate.”

The aid—mainly food and medical equipment—is meant for Syrians displaced from their hometowns, and for hungry civilians. It is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, European donors, and the United Nations. Whether it continues is now the subject of anguished debate among officials in Washington and European. The fear is that stopping aid would hurt innocent civilians and would be used for propaganda purposes by the militants, who would likely blame the West for added hardship.

The Bible says if your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him something to drink—doing so will “heap burning coals” of shame on his head. But there is no evidence that the militants of the Islamic State, widely known as ISIS or ISIL, feel any sense of disgrace or indignity (and certainly not gratitude) receiving charity from their foes.

Quite the reverse, the aid convoys have to pay off ISIS emirs (leaders) for the convoys to enter the eastern Syrian extremist strongholds of Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor, providing yet another income stream for ISIS militants, who are funding themselves from oil smuggling, extortion, and the sale of whatever they can loot, including rare antiquities from museums and archaeological sites.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Government, Other Views, War

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Only 4% of drone victims in Pakistan named as al Qaeda members by Jack Serle

Posted on October 17, 2014 | Leave a comment

From Jack Serle, of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London:

As the number of US drone strikes in Pakistan hits 400, research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism finds that fewer than 4% of the people killed have been identified by available records as named members of al Qaeda. This calls in to question US Secretary of State John Kerry’s claim last year that only “confirmed terrorist targets at the highest level” were fired at.

The Bureau’s Naming the Dead project has gathered the names and, where possible, the details of people killed by CIA drones in Pakistan since June 2004. On October 11 an attack brought the total number of drone strikes in Pakistan up to 400.

The names of the dead have been collected over a year of research in and outside Pakistan, using a multitude of sources. These include both Pakistani government records leaked to the Bureau, and hundreds of open source reports in English, Pashtun and Urdu.

Naming the Dead has also drawn on field investigations conducted by the Bureau’s researchers in Pakistan and other organisations, including Amnesty International, Reprieve and the Centre for Civilians in Conflict.

Only 704 of the 2,379 dead have been identified, and only 295 of these were reported to be members of some kind of armed group. Few corroborating details were available for those who were just described as militants. More than a third of them were not designated a rank, and almost 30% are not even linked to a specific group. Only 84 are identified as members of al Qaeda – less than 4% of the total number of people killed.

These findings “demonstrate the continuing complete lack of transparency surrounding US drone operations,” said Mustafa Qadri, Pakistan researcher for Amnesty International.

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He Said That? 10/12/14

Posted on October 12, 2014 | Leave a comment

From Hernando de Soto, the founder of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Lima, Peru, the author of “The Mystery of Capital” and host of the documentary “Unlikely Heroes of the Arab Spring.”

All too often, the way that Westerners think about the world’s poor closes their eyes to reality on the ground. In the Middle East and North Africa, it turns out, legions of aspiring entrepreneurs are doing everything they can, against long odds, to claw their way into the middle class. And that is true across all of the world’s regions, peoples and faiths. Economic aspirations trump the overhyped “cultural gaps” so often invoked to rationalize inaction.

As countries from China to Peru to Botswana have proved in recent years, poor people can adapt quickly when given a framework of modern rules for property and capital. The trick is to start. We must remember that, throughout history, capitalism has been created by those who were once poor.

I can tell you firsthand that terrorist leaders are very different from their recruits. The radical leaders whom I encountered in Peru were generally murderous, coldblooded, tactical planners with unwavering ambitions to seize control of the government. Most of their sympathizers and would-be recruits, by contrast, would rather have been legal economic agents, creating better lives for themselves and their families.

The best way to end terrorist violence is to make sure the twisted calls of terrorist leaders fall on deaf ears.

“The Capitalist Cure For Terrorism,” The Wall Street Journal, 10/11/12-10/12/12

Capitalism is the best anti-poverty and anti-terrorist program ever invented.

 

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Posted in Culture, Economics, Foreign Policy, Government, Other Views

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