MEMORANDUM FOR: The PresidentFROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for SanitySUBJECT: Is Iran the “World’s Leading Sponsor of Terrorism?”EXECUTIVE SUMMARY/BACKGROUND We are concerned by recent strident and stark public statements from key members of your Administration that paint Iran in very alarmist terms. The average American, without the benefit of history, could easily be persuaded that Iran poses an imminent threat and that there is no alternative for us but military conflict.We find...

Many Americans have been shocked by recent revelations of the extent of sexual harassment in Congress. However, no one should be too surprised that those who spend their lives defending and expanding the welfare-warfare state engage in immoral personal conduct. It is only natural that an immoral system, like the welfare-warfare state, tends to attract individuals likely to practice personal immorality.The welfare-warfare state is built on a foundation of taxation and fiat currency controlled...

Sometimes you wake up in the morning and it’s 2003 all over again. That was the year when the United States embarked on its catastrophic course of intervention in Asia. It was at least somewhat justified in invading Afghanistan to eliminate al-Qaeda but then made the mistake of sticking around to fix the country, a repair job that has lasted sixteen years and counting with no end in sight. And it was also the time when the neoconservatives who were then controlling the Pentagon and White House...

Green Party presidential Candidate Jill Stein is being investigated by the Senate Intelligence (sic) Committee for “Russian connections.”What has brought Russiagate to Jill Stein? The answer is that she attended the 10th Anniversary RT dinner in Moscow as did the notorious “Russian collaborator” US General Michael Flynn. RT is a news organization, a far better one than exists in the West, but if you were one of the many accomplished people who attended the anniversary dinner, you are regarded...

One day after Trump escalated his war of words with the UN, threatening to cut off foreign financial aid over today's UN vote on the president's decision to recognize Jerusalem the capital of Israel, the United Nations on Thursday delivered what has been dubbed a "stunning rebuke" of the US President's Jerusalem decision, voting overwhelmingly to condemn the move and calling on the U.S. to withdraw the decision.The final vote was a landslide against Israel, with some 128 nations voting in...

What do we make of Trump’s national security speech? First of all, it is the military/security complex’s speech, and it is inconsistent with Trump’s intention of normalizing relations with Russia.The military/security complex, using Trump’s position as President, has defined Russia and China as “revisionist powers,” Washington’s rivals who seek to put their own national interests ahead of Washington’s unilateralism. Russia and China are “revisionist powers” because their assertion of their...

There was a sinister plot to meddle in the 2016 election, after all. But it was not orchestrated from the Kremlin; it was an entirely homegrown affair conducted from the inner sanctums -- the White House, DOJ, the Hoover Building and Langley -- of the Imperial City.Likewise, the perpetrators didn't speak Russian or write in the Cyrillic script. In fact, they were lifetime beltway insiders occupying the highest positions of power in the US government.Here are the names and rank of the principal...

President Trump has often said that his foreign policy objective was to keep his enemies guessing. If that’s the goal, you could say that he’s doing a good job. The problem is who does he think his enemies are, because the American people are often left guessing as well.US policy toward North Korea last week is a good example of how the Trump Administration is wittingly or unwittingly sowing confusion among friend and foe alike. In what looked like a breakthrough, Secretary of State Rex...

US Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis has refuted claims that the US is preparing for war on Iran after US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley led a bizarre press conference in which she stated that Iran has armed Houthi fighters in Yemen and thus violating the terms of the JCPOA (aka Iran nuclear deal). Haley did not provide any evidence to substantiate her claims, claims which are logistically impossible given the Saudi led blockade of Yemen which predates the JCPOA by nearly four...

The State Department recently announced it was committing $700,000 to what might be called Project Overreach – an American government initiative to “help” the Hungarians get the “right” news.Department mandarins, it seems, have determined that Hungarians need access to “objective media” about what is happening in and to their country. As Ronald Reagan once said, “there you go again.” My view: It’s a really bad idea, an egregious misuse of U.S. taxpayer dollars, and also, understandably, deeply...

Sometimes things can be made more complicated than they really are. And such is the case with the story that the Russian government hacked the Democratic National Committee so as to help Trump become president.In July 2016 Wikileaks released a number of documents showing that the nomination of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate for president had been rigged. A month earlier the DNC had announced it had been "hacked" and the cybersecurity company it hired announced that the Russians...

Years late to the party, mainstream media outlets like USA Today, Reuters, and Buzzfeed are just out with "breaking" and "exclusive" stories detailing how a vast arsenal of weapons sent to Syria by the CIA in cooperation with US allies fuelled the rapid growth of ISIS. Buzzfeed's story entitled, Blowback: ISIS Got A Powerful Missile The CIA Secretly Bought In Bulgaria, begins by referencing "a new report on how ISIS built its arsenal highlights how the US purchased munitions, intended for...

The disclosure of fiercely anti-Trump text messages between two romantically involved senior FBI officials who played key roles in the early Russia-gate inquiry has turned the supposed Russian-election-meddling “scandal” into its own scandal, by providing evidence that some government investigators saw it as their duty to block or destroy Donald Trump’s presidency.As much as the U.S. mainstream media has mocked the idea that an American “deep state” exists and that it has maneuvered to remove...

Secret police are characteristic of dictatorships, or so goes the conventional thinking on the subject. Police in democracies operate for the most part transparently and within a set of rules and guidelines that limits their ability to gratuitously punish citizens who have done nothing wrong. If a policeman operating under rule-of-law steps out of line, he can be held accountable. That is also conventional thinking.But what happens when an ostensibly “democratic” police force becomes corrupted...

Are you worried about war? We are. Iran, North Korea, Russia. Every day we feel we might wake up to hear that the missiles have been launched. Ron Paul created his Institute for Peace and Prosperity in 2013 to be an uncompromising voice opposing war and war propaganda. Many of the Beltway think tanks preaching foreign policy "restraint" are really all about compromise, because they believe if they remain true to principles they will not be “relevant.” Relevant to whom? Relevant to the...