The RPI Challenge

It was the baby’s fault that he was nearly burned to death in his own crib. Bou-Bou Phonesavanh was barely a year and a half old, just learning to walk, and unable to speak, but those limitations didn’t stop him from engaging in “deliberate, criminal conduct” that justified the 2:00 a.m. no-knock SWAT raid in which he was nearly killed. The act of sleeping in a room about to be breached by a SWAT team constituted “criminal” conduct on the part of the infant. At the very least, the infant was...

Video footage surfaced last week showing the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) treating a wounded anti-Assad Syrian rebel, following a UN report at the end of last year which found that the IDF and the Syrian rebels (including ISIS) were in regular contact. The Times of Israel reported on this latest video in an article titled, IDF posts footage of medics saving Syrian rebel in Golan: The IDF on Saturday released rare footage of its medics performing a life-saving procedure on one of the most...

Currently the United States is assisting Ukraine against Russia by providing some non-lethal military equipment as well as limited training for Kiev’s army. It has balked at getting more involved in the conflict, rightly so. With that in mind, I had a meeting with a delegation of Ukrainian parliamentarians and government officials a couple of weeks ago. I tried to explain to them why many Americans are wary of helping them by providing lethal, potentially game changing military assistance in...

Pamela GellerSince 9/11, Americans have been treated to an ongoing tutorial by the self-professed best-and brightest from America’s universities, media, Christian clergy, and national government explaining how American Muslims become radicalized into Islamist militants. These Muslims, say the country’s brains-trust, are discriminated against by other US citizens; are disenfranchised by poverty; have a hard time transitioning to US society from the Muslim culture they lived in abroad; hate all...

On Friday the House passed a massive National Defense Authorization for 2016 that will guarantee US involvement in more wars and overseas interventions for years to come. The Republican majority resorted to trickery to evade the meager spending limitations imposed by the 2011 budget control act – limitations that did not, as often reported, cut military spending but only slowed its growth. But not even slower growth is enough when you have an empire to maintain worldwide, so the House majority...

The US government is undermining Americans’ rights at home through surveillance, and its drone program “should’ve been shut down a long time ago,” former Texas Congressman Ron Paul told RT. He also criticized the prospect of another Clinton-Bush election. Speaking on RT’s ‘Watching the Hawks’ program, Paul was asked if it’s time to close down the drone program considering that two hostages were recently killed in an airstrike. “It should’ve been shut down a long time ago – it should have never...

The government can block your foreign husband or wife from living with you in America, based on secret information you can’t see or contest. Like with the No-Fly list, in post-Constitutional America the walls are built of secret databases. Taking Visas to the Supreme Court On February 23, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Kerry v. Din. The U.S. government is seeking a writ of certiorari agreement by the Justices to review a lower court decision granting Ms. Din and her Afghan husband...

The FBI surveilled peaceful protests in Baltimore following the police killing of Freddie Gray, protest acts protected by the First Amendment, from the air, using high-tech monitoring aircraft. The surveillance aircraft can be equipped with infrared and other surveillance gear that extend the intrusion into privacy far into unconstitutional territory. When violence rocked Baltimore recently, local Police Captain Jeff Long told reporters “When you’ve got something like this, you’ve got people...

“The government is merely a servant―merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn’t. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.” ― Mark Twain How many Americans have actually bothered to read the Constitution, let alone the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights (a quick read at 462 words)? Take a few minutes and read those words for yourself—rather than having some...

This week the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the NSA’s metadata collection program was not authorized in US law. The PATRIOT Act, under which the program began, was too vague, the court found. But the truth is the Act was intended to be vague so that the government could interpret it in the broadest possible way. But this is really more of a technicality, because illegality and unconstitutionality are really two very different things. Even if Congress had explicitly authorized the...

The effectiveness of U.S. drone attacks in killing their targets vs. missing their targets and killing innocent human beings is analyzed in fine detail in this report. It looks at multiple attempts to kill a given person. For example, there were 3 U.S. drone attacks on the now-dead Mullah Nazir. These killed 24 innocent civilians. There were 3 U.S. drone attacks on the now-dead Mullah Sangeen Zadran; these killed 108 innocent civilians. Five attacks on the still-living Sirrajudin Haqqani have...

When Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State in 2009, the Obama White House required her to sign an agreement promising to have her family’s charities, under the umbrella of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI; now known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation) submit new donations from foreign countries to the State Department for review. The Agreement The agreement was designed to avoid potential conflicts of interest, given her new government role. The arrangement was made by...