William Kristol is promoting at the Weekly Standard an article by "two of America’s leading libertarian legal thinkers, "no friends to intrusive government," to support Kristol's assertion that the National Security Agency mass secret spying program is a "legitimate use of government power to protect the nation from our enemies abroad." The defense of the NSA program by these two authors is of particular note because of the authors' affiliation with the Cato Institute that describes itself as...

So says Senator Lindsey Graham. This week, asked about NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s apparent support for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, the Senator magnanimously told Slate reporter David Weigel that he did not necessarily believe donating to Ron Paul’s campaign should disqualify someone from receiving a security clearance, as that is just “exercising [the] right to participate in the political process.” Besides, said Graham, “Ron Paul isn't a threat to America. His policies are.” The ideas...

It is a rare treat to see such a contrast of views in one television news segment. It is the contrast that makes our point at RPI as well as it could be made. Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald debating former spokesman of former President George W. Bush Ari Fleischer on revelations that the US government has become a total surveillance state that past totalitarian regimes could have not even fathomed.Watch the video here.For any of us who, faced with the current administration's breathtaking...

For the neo-con dominated foreign policy establishment, nothing succeeds like failure. RPI has recently covered the total collapse of Iraq. Then there’s the intervention in Libya, where even Neocon warhawk Max Boot must admit the sorry state of affairs, as he moans: “...not only is Libya at the mercy of various militias but it is so ungoverned that its distant deserts in the southwest have become a refuge for al-Qaeda fighters fleeing the French offensive in Mali.” Prior to the decision to...

After meeting with Al Qaeda-aligned rebels in Syria, McCain describes the “moving experience” that he had: “It was a very moving experience to meet these fighters who have been struggling now for over two years.” McCain then followed with a plea for more U.S. assistance to the rebels: “Their message was, to be frank with you: they do not understand,” he said. “They do not understand why we won’t help them. McCain also cannot understand why Americans are against intervention in Syria. Here are...

Senator John McCain snuck into Syria this Memorial Day to spend the day with the terrorist-affiliated Free Syrian Army, in violation of both Syrian Law and likely of international law. While meeting with the Syrian insurgents and FSA Commander, Gen. Salem Idris, McCain likely assured his allies that it was only a matter of time before the US began overtly transferring the weapons it is currently facilitating covertly.Gen. Idriss is the conduit for hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid, and...

Jennifer Rubin, one of Washington Post’s neoconservative gate-keepers, is still trying to obfuscate the real issue behind what happened in Benghazi in 2011. Over the weekend, Rubin wrote: “The biggest scandal regarding Benghazi may be that the president was not at the helm on 9-11-2011 and was not directing the response to an attack.” Yet, one must look beyond the superficial to locate the heart of what happened in Benghazi. As Ron Paul pointed out: "there was little extremism in Libya before...

In yesterday’s Washington Post, neo-conservative editorial page editor Fred Hiatt has a panic attack over the (imagined by him) possibility that President Obama is in his second term beginning to ponder some of the limitations of US interventionism world-wide. On the proposed withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan next year, after 13 years of war, Hiatt claims: “To say the war will end because U.S. troops are gone is like the toddler who imagines no one can see him when he closes his eyes....

Non-interventionists can learn a great deal by observing when the differing factions of the neo-conservative enterprise take to exposing each other. Take the Left-neocon New Republic, a magazine that hemorrhages money at such a rate that it literally had a hard time being given away until Facebook kid mega-millionaire Chris Hughes decided to snatch it up with pocket change as a child's toy. Hughes was a deep-pockets campaign supporter of the hyper-interventionist Obama, and in his new...

Shortly after the US Secretary of Defense weakly claimed that chemical weapons have been used in Syria, the neocons went directly onto warpath mode. Never mind that no evidence was presented at all to substantiate the claims and the US intelligence community appears to have been blindsided by Secretary Hagel, who was himself blindsided by claims from an Israeli general immediately after he departed the country. Truth has never impeded the neo-cons at all, and they have been pining for war with...