Thank you for joining this week’s edition of RPI’s podcast, Five Minutes Five Issues! You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show at Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, and SoundCloud.
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The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity welcomes you to Five Minutes Five Issues.
Starting in five four three two one.
Hello, I am Adam Dick, a Ron Paul Institute senior fellow.
Let’s start.
Issue one.
In the Wednesday presidential debate, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who is a prominent proponent of United States military intervention in the Middle East, offered some questionable geographic information in promoting the US-backed attack on the Iraqi city of Mosul. Clinton declared that Mosul “is on the border of Syria.”
At US News and World Report, Steven Nelson corrected Clinton. Nelson writes that “Mosul is not directly on the border with Syria, which is about 100 miles to the west or 75 miles northwest to the nearest border crossing.”
As I mentioned in a September article for the Ron Paul Institute regarding a questionable geography-based argument offered on the US Senate floor for providing weapons to Saudi Arabia that are used in war on Yemen, geographic mistakes that would seem of little concern when offered by someone arguing on principle for the US to stay out of foreign conflicts can be quite disturbing when made to advance a supposedly practical case for US intervention or war abroad.
Issue two.
Have you noticed some very different media coverage of military actions related to the Syrian city of Aleppo and Iraqi city of Mosul? Robert Parry has. He wrote the following in a Consortium News article:
Note how differently The New York Times prepares the American public for civilian casualties from the new U.S.-backed Iraqi government assault on the city of Mosul to free it from the Islamic State, compared to the unrelenting condemnation of the Russian-backed Syrian government assault on neighborhoods of east Aleppo held by Al Qaeda.
In the case of Mosul, the million-plus residents are not portrayed as likely victims of American airstrikes and Iraqi government ground assaults, though surely many will die during the offensive. Instead, the civilians are said to be eagerly awaiting liberation from the Islamic State terrorists and their head-chopping brutality.
Issue three.
Jeff Schogol reported Monday in Marine Times that the government of Norway is considering a US military request to station US Marines in Norway. Hope Hodge Seck relates at military.com that the Norway parliament must approve the planned stationing of about 300 US Marines in Norway before it can occur.
In February, Ryan Browne reported at CNN that US “Marines are prepositioning battle tanks, artillery and logistics equipment inside Norwegian caves as the U.S. pushes to station equipment near the NATO-Russia frontier.” Browne writes that the caves had also contained US military equipment during the Cold War and may now contain enough equipment to support 15,000 Marines.
Issue four.
In September of 2013, I wrote at the Ron Paul Institute website regarding the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) working with state governments to develop a photos database of Americans.
A report published Tuesday by the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown University says such a database now includes photos of 64 million people. The report elaborates:
…16 states let the FBI use face recognition technology to compare the faces of suspected criminals to their driver’s license and ID photos, creating a virtual line-up of their state residents. In this line-up, it’s not a human that points to the suspect—it’s an algorithm.
Expect more states to join in on the FBI database. And that database is not the whole story. The report notes that, “[a]cross the country, state and local police departments are building their own face recognition systems, many of them more advanced than the FBI’s,” and that police have searched via state databases the driver’s license and ID photos of roughly half of American adults.
Issue five.
At a Wednesday press conference, US Secretary of State John Kerry said the following related to the war in Syria: “Every bomb that is dropped by Russia and the Assad regime is radicalizing more and more people.”
Yet, Kerry fails to voice the same conclusion about the effects of the thousands upon thousands of US bombs that have brought destruction in countries including Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan.
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That’s a wrap.
Transcripts of Five Minutes Five Issues episodes, including links to related information, are at the Ron Paul Institute blog.
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