The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
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The Korean War Was a Senseless Waste of American Lives

Wednesday June 7, 2023

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The remains of an American soldier were laid to rest on Memorial Day at the Andersonville National Cemetery in Georgia after a police car with lights flashing escorted the casket to the cemetery. What made this funeral service so unique and so tragic is that Pfc. Luther Herschel Story was killed on September 1, 1950, during the Korean War.  He was just eighteen years old.

Story left high school during his sophomore year and enlisted in the Army. In the summer of 1950, he deployed to Korea with Company A of the 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment. After he was wounded when his unit came under attack by three divisions of North Korean troops, Story seized a machine gun and killed or wounded about 100 men according to his Medal of Honor citation that his father received at a Pentagon ceremony in 1951. 

“Realizing that his wounds would hamper his comrades, he refused to retire to the next position but remained to cover the company’s withdrawal,” the award citation said. “When last seen, he was firing every weapon available and fighting off another hostile assault.” An unidentified body recovered from the area where Story was last seen fighting was buried in 1950 with other unknown service members at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii.
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Rule by Decree: The Emergency State’s Plot to Override the Constitution

Tuesday June 6, 2023

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We have become a nation in a permanent state of emergency.

Power-hungry and lawless, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.

COVID-19, for example, served as the driving force behind what Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch characterized as “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”

In a statement attached to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Arizona v. Mayorkas, a case that challenged whether the government could continue to use it pandemic powers even after declaring the public health emergency over, Gorsuch provided a catalog of the many ways in which the government used COVID-19 to massively overreach its authority and suppress civil liberties.
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Snowden and the Fight for American Privacy

Tuesday June 6, 2023

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Edward Snowden did heroic service in awakening Americans to Washington ravishing their privacy. Snowden’s “reward” is to be banished in Russia without a snowball’s chance in hell of a fair trial if he returns to America. But as he courageously declared, “I would rather be without a state than without a voice.” He explained why he leaked classified information: “I can’t in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”

To recognize Snowden’s contribution to liberty, it helps to review the political and legal  landscape before his revelations. In 2008, Sen. Barack Obama’s denunciations of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretaps secured his image as a champion of civil liberties. Campaigning for president, Obama pledged “no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens…. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient.” Unfortunately, Obama didn’t promise not to ignore the law when it was “really, really convenient.”
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The Biden Administration’s Latest Tone-Deaf Foreign Policy Positions

Monday June 5, 2023

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U.S. leaders rarely have been noted for being able to gauge changing sentiment in the international arena and adjusting their foreign policy accordingly. The Biden administration, however, may be setting new records for the tone-deaf quality of its policies. Three incidents in the past few weeks illustrate the problem.

There has been obvious movement in recent months on the part of leading Arab powers to temper their feud with Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. Only a few years ago, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other countries were in a partnership with Turkey and the United States to unseat Assad – largely because of his close alliance with Iran. Now, those same powers have changed course dramatically, seeking a rapprochement with both Damascus and Tehran. Important signals of the new political environment were Saudi Arabia’s restoration of diplomatic relations with Iran and Syria’s re-entry to the Arab League.

Instead of going along with the new diplomatic and geopolitical realities in the region, the Biden administration chose this moment to escalate its increasingly futile attempts to isolate Assad. On May 30, Washington imposed new economic sanctions on Syria. As Dave DeCamp noted, the businesses were targeted using the Caesar Act, a law the US has used to impose sanctions on Syria that are specifically designed to prevent the country’s reconstruction." One could scarcely imagine a more ill-timed move, given the powerful, contrary diplomatic trends in the region.


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Never Again? DeSantis and Torture

Monday June 5, 2023

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During a press conference at the Museum of Tolerance in West Jerusalem in April, Ron DeSantis was questioned about a former detainee’s claim that as a naval attorney at Guantanamo DeSantis watched as the prisoner was force fed, something the UN regards as torture. “Do you honestly believe that’s credible? It’s 2006, I’m a junior officer, do you honestly think that they would’ve remembered me?” DeSantis responded angrily.

Mansoor Adayfi, a Yemeni citizen, was held at Guantanamo Bay for 14 years, and has told news outlets that DeSantis witnessed him being force fed during a hunger strike in 2006. Adayfi in an op-ed for Al Jazeera said “As I tried to break free, I noticed DeSantis’ handsome face among the crowd at the other side of the chain link. He was watching me struggle. He was smiling and laughing with other officers as I screamed in pain.” Two former detainees, as well as defense lawyers and base officials, have told The Washington Post DeSantis had a “close up views” of disturbing incidents at the camp during his time there.

What might DeSantis have seen? In addition to Adayfi’s account, we have Imad Abdullah Hassan’s more detailed rendition, from a man who spent twelve years in Guantanamo in a cage without ever being charged with anything. A judge cleared Hassan for release, finding there was not enough incriminating evidence to justify keeping him imprisoned (779 men were held at Guantanamo since it opened in 2002, with 12 ever charged with crimes. Only two have been convicted.) Hassan’s clearance came, yet he remained at America’s off-shore penal colony without explanation or hope of release. He went on a hunger strike in 2009 in protest (the U.S. military refers to it as a “long-term non-religious fast”), and was force-fed.
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Republicans Fiscally Irresponsible Act

Monday June 5, 2023

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The political and financial class breathed a sigh of relief when Congress passed the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023. The bill suspends the debt ceiling for two years, thus avoiding the establishment’s nightmare of a government default on its debt. Rather, it allows the government to continue adding trillions of dollars of debt that will be monetized by the Federal Reserve. 

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WHO Initiative Would ‘Promote Desired Behaviors’ by Surveilling Social Media

Thursday June 1, 2023

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The World Health Organization (WHO) is proposing a set of recommendations for “social listening surveillance systems” designed to address what it describes as a “health threat” posed by online “misinformation.” The WHO’s Preparedness and Resilience for Emerging Threats (PRET) initiative claims “misinformation” has resulted in an “infodemic” that poses a threat — even in instances where the information is “accurate.”
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