Former Congressman Ron Paul discusses his video interviews on the Ron Paul Channel; why the US has no business telling Egyptians what to do with their own country; lessening the terrorism threat with non-interventionist foreign policy; how Obama’s “red line” on Syria bypasses Congress’s duty to declare war; the incentive for Syrian rebels to conduct false flag chemical weapons attacks; and the selective prosecution of whistleblowers and war criminals.
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Why does the U.S. support the tortured dictatorship in Egypt?
Because that's what Israel wants.
Why can't America make peace with Iran?
Because that's not what Israel wants.
And why do we veto every attempt to shut down illegal settlements on the West Bank?
Because it's what Israel wants.
Seeing a pattern here?
Sick of it yet?
It's time to put America first.
Support the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org and push back against the Israel lobby and their sock puppets in Washington, D.C.
That's councilforthenationalinterest.org.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest today is Dr. Ron Paul on the phone from his office in South Texas.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
Good to be with you.
Doing fine.
Good deal.
Hey, I'm really excited about the new Ron Paul channel.
It's just great.
And especially your whole first episode there with the secret wars and the Glenn Greenwald interview and all that.
Just, it's great stuff.
I'm really excited about it.
Good.
So, I guess along those lines, I will say real quick, obviously I don't mind paying, but I'm seeing on Facebook a lot of people complaining, and it seems like one of your real strengths is your broad appeal.
You'll always be able to get diehard Ron Paulians like me to sign up, but if you really want to get the videos to go viral on everybody's cell phone and Facebook page and stuff, it seems like, and believe me, I know it's hard to raise money doing this kind of thing.
There's got to be a better way, but it's a concern anyway.
I thought I'd bring it up.
Well, the people that are putting this together, you know, they've spent a lot of money, invested a lot of money, and they have to pay the bills.
The other alternative is trying to go out and work hard to get advertisers, and then you're in a way beholding to the advertisers, and who likes to watch the advertisements all the time or go with your hat in hand all the time?
So this was the proposal, and this was the business model, is to get people to pay for the services, and there's still a lot of other stuff that I do.
I'm gone all the time.
This is just one aspect of it, and there's a lot of people employed doing this, and for free market people to say that you shouldn't charge 83 cents per filming, that's what it comes out to be.
It's less than a dollar to watch one episode.
Yeah, yeah, no, I'm happy to do it.
I just want to see it with as broad a reach as possible, but believe me, I sympathize with exactly that dilemma of the advertising and then the hat in hand thing, too.
It's embarrassing asking for donations.
It's humiliating.
So I don't have the solution for you.
I'm only passing along the concern, unfortunately, but anyway, I love the new show.
I think it's great, and I think you make a great TV host, and I knew you would, and I really like your co-host.
I'm sorry I forget her name, but I think she does a great job playing Ed McMahon to your Johnny, and it's a perfect thing.
I think it's really great.
OK, so now let's talk about important things, more important.
They're letting Mubarak out of jail.
What do you think of that?
Well, maybe our government, with their infinite wisdom, will put him back in charge.
You know, who knows the silliness of that whole thing?
It can't settle things.
I mean, it won't be more calm, but I just don't have strong opinions on who should run Egypt just so it isn't us, so it's not our money or our troops or our influence or our military.
I want us just to be out of there, and I think we should let the Egyptians decide who's going to run their country.
Yeah, well, and that's what you've been saying for a long, long time while America was backing Hosni Mubarak there.
What do you think, like, say, for example, as things were breaking loose and everything started going crazy in the Arab Spring back at the beginning of 2011, should they have gone ahead and just kept backing him at that point rather than have the country go through all of this with the phony elections and now canceled and the massacres in the streets and everything?
No, I think we should recognize that the policy of intervention is wrong and quit it as soon as you can, because it's the intervention that generates the hatred not only against their dictator that we prop up, but us as well.
And that's why Islam has the greatest incentive to be radicalized.
I mean, this is this is why a lot of people in Iran right now would like to do us harm.
And we can't get along with them.
But we've been in their face and telling them what to do, you know, for a long time, starting back as far back as 1953.
So I think whether it's supporting Saddam Hussein or working with Osama bin Laden at times and then switching around and right now the global war on terrorism and everything that we do in the drone warfare is a great recruiting tool for the radicals.
The more we do, the more Al Qaeda members there are and the more determined they will become.
So the sooner you quit doing it, I think it would be better.
We then would, you know, save a lot of money.
We would be less hated.
We are seeking national security, you know, would be a lot better.
So I don't see any disadvantages from becoming more neutral in all these areas.
Well, it's something else that you've been talking about a long time in regards to foreign policy is the prerogatives of the president and what are and are not his powers.
And there are times when you said, hey, when it comes to troop movements, Congress should back off.
That really is not their responsibility.
But when it comes to deciding who commits what violence, that really is up to the Congress.
And I just wonder what you think about this so-called red line on Syria that Obama, I guess, just created in a speech will be the history textbook version of what happened.
Obama used the word red line and then that became a thing.
And now especially this is important because there's another claim of a chemical weapons attack in Syria.
Well, I think that we should recognize when acts of wars are committed and bombing and invading and and subsidizing and sending weapons, that's all active war should be done without congressional approval.
So the president does not have this authority to arbitrarily say, well, if so and so does this, that means I'm going to do this, which is accelerate the war.
So I think he's I think he's wrong in doing that.
Someday we may find out that the last person who would have an incentive to use poison gas would be Assad.
I mean, he he's been warned to have the hand of all governments will come down on him if he uses it.
And if he uses just a little bit, what does he gain?
He doesn't gain anything other than the fact that the heavy hand will come down on him.
It'll be much tougher for him.
But who does have an incentive?
Who has a benefit?
Well, the radicals, the people who are trying to take over.
And there's there are several groups and Al-Qaeda is involved.
So Al-Qaeda might say, boy, you know, if we can blame an incident like this on Assad, we're going to get the weapons and we're going to get all these governments come in and help us.
And and we once again, we'll be helping the Al-Qaeda just as we put the Al-Qaeda into Iraq fighting Saddam Hussein, eventually, who who at one time was fighting Al-Qaeda.
So we have a country now that we redesigned and Al-Qaeda is in Iraq.
And we'll probably continue to do this instead of, you know, sorting this all out.
I have no idea who did it, nor do nor does our government.
But logic tells me that Assad probably is not an idiot.
I mean, he would have to be, you know, out of his mind if he thinks a little bit of gas is going to win the war for him when he knows that all the other countries in the world will come down hard on him.
Well, now, if anything, I wouldn't call it wisdom, but perhaps President Obama is afraid to intervene in Syria.
He keeps sending the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff out to come up with reasons why not.
And he's even going so far as to sound a little bit like you here and saying, hey, you know, these guys that we're backing are not our friends and they're not going to be our friends.
It's not that hard to see that close into the future here, you know?
Well, the problem with it is they might realize the impracticality of what they're doing and they want to back off.
But they don't they don't start their thinking about foreign policy in a principled way.
The principle that they do accept is intervention, that we have this moral obligation to you know, if we don't send troops, we send humanitarian aid.
And behind the scenes, we use the CIA, we use drones.
We don't need invading armies.
And so but they never they never question themselves about intervention.
And this is what the kind of mess we have in Egypt is not on.
Should we intervene or not?
It's what do we get for it?
And what kind of a management do we support Mubarak or don't we do so we support more say, you know, it's back and forth.
So it's a management thing that they debate, not a principled question on whether or not we should be involved at all.
All right.
Now, as you know, Bradley Manning was sentenced yesterday to 35 years for the leak of the Iraq and Afghan war logs in the State Department cables.
And I just wonder if it had been you and Attorney General Turley and Secretary of Defense Bacevich, would you guys have gone after this case like this and put him away for 35 years?
No, I think there'd be something done and probably discharged.
He probably should have never been in the military, but he served a lot of time already.
He served more time than than William Calley did under house arrest for killing five or six hundred innocent kids and women in Vietnam.
And he he didn't suffer any severe consequences.
So I think that, you know, some of those people who were committing the war crimes, like the people even in Iraq and Afghanistan, killing innocent people, they they don't even get charged with anything.
What about the war crimes that we participate in?
No, it's anybody who tells us the truth about it.
So, no, I think he has served plenty of time.
I don't think he should be sentenced.
I think that he's admitted to releasing information.
He should, you know, be penalized for that with the time served.
But I just I would just discharge him from the military.
And what about Edward Snowden?
Would you go ahead and give him a preemptive pardon kind of thing, invite him back home?
Yeah, I think if unless there's something awfully weird came up, you know, he's charged with, you know, aiding the enemy.
But I don't think for a minute that he did.
I don't think that was his purpose.
And and there's no evidence to that, just as, you know, even a judge threw out this whole idea that Manning was aiding the enemy.
He wasn't doing that.
They want to they're aiding the American people by telling us the truth.
So those individuals who said that who say that Snowden was giving this information to the enemy must have that perverse understanding that we're the enemy.
If we get to know what they're doing, that undermines, of course, the credibility of the empire.
And that's certainly something they don't want to happen.
So they have to perpetuate the lies to the best of their ability.
All right, well, we're about out of time here, but I guess I'll just give you a chance real quick to invite everybody to check out the Ron Paul channel, could you?
Yeah, all they need to do is run Paul channel dot com and find out today I'll be interviewing Eric Margolis on Egypt and we'll continue to do those kind of interviews and do our very best to get the information and the truth out.
Right on.
Well, thank you so much for your time again on the show, Dr.
Paul.
It's great to talk to you again.
OK, Scott.
All right.
That is Dr. Ron Paul, former congressman.
And let's see, author of the Revolution, a manifesto and the Fed, a foreign policy of freedom.
Check out the Ron Paul channel, Ron Paul channel dot com.
We'll be right back.
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