Rep. Ron Paul's Audit the Fed bill received overwhelming, bipartisan support last month. The evening of the vote, Senator Rand Paul announced to a crowd at YAL's National Convention: "If we win on [Audit the Fed], we should next audit the Pentagon."
Well, the efforts to make this happen are not waiting for Sen. Harry Reid to bring Audit the Fed to the Senate floor. About a week later, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) introduced, S.3487, the Audit the Pentagon Act of 2012. If enacted, this bill would create incentives and enforcement mechanisms to force the Pentagon to pass an audit. By law -- the Chief Financial Officer Act of 1990, to be exact -- the Department of Defense is required to pass an audit, but Congress has yet to act in enforcing this requirement.
Why the sudden push? After the Budget Control Act (BCA) had been signed into law, the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction failed in their task to find $1.5 trillion in spending cuts and/or revenue increases over the next ten years. This forces sequestration, which, in part, mandates the Department of Defense cut $500 billion in projected spending over the next ten years.
"Women and children were among the victims," Helmand police spokesman Farid Ahmad Farhang said, adding that they had been travelling in the Musa Qala district of the restive province.
Roadside bombs are a favourite weapon of Taliban fighting government forces and their NATO backers, but often miss their targets and kill civilians.
The latest deaths come two days after a report by the United Nations said 1,145 civilians had been killed and 1,954 wounded in the war in the first six months of this year.
Of course, it is not just brown-skinned Muslims that are needlessly dying in that unnecessary, purposeless war. In news reports that are sure to pull heartstrings, American lives have been been lost in Afghanistan as well. As reported by Antiwar.com's John Glaser, there have been two separate incidents in the past two days where Afghan soldiers have turned their U.S.-funded military training and weapons against American soldiers:
Three more US soldiers were shot and killed on Saturday by an Afghan trainee at a base in Helmand province, raising to six the number of American troops killed by their Afghan partners in just 24 hours.
Sixty-seven years ago this week, in 1945, our government, under the tenure of Harry S. Truman, dropped two nuclear bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. According to the conventional narrative, these bombings were justified. They were necessary, but difficult, decisions made by the Truman administration.
This narrative often goes unchallenged, despite the overwhelming amount of evidence corroborating the contrary -- that it was neither necessary nor legal for the US to inflict a nuclear holocaust upon these two Japanese cities. The most compelling reason for this is that the Japanese were wiling to surrender at the condition of retaining their emperor, whom they retained anyway.
In this video, a mother and her son fail to save the remainder of their family members, all of whom were trapped in a house fire. This heart-breaking, animated story, written and lived by a survivor, provides a historically accurate account of what really happened, 67 years ago, when Harry S. Truman dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, instantly killing tens of thousands of men, women and children.
Warning: Though animated, many of the images in this video are extremely graphic and disturbing. Watch at your own discretion.
I recently took part in a "Conservatives against Unconstitutional Undeclared Wars" event, which can be easily duplicated in any area. We set this rally up in about a week and a half, and there were about 240 people there at one point!
We got news coverage by the Charlotte Observer (largest news paper in NC) and a local tv news station. We made some emails to people like Gary Johnson, TMOT, Jordan Page, and had some local representatives. Almost everyone we asked to come came. We sent out some press releases (further down in the post). We have a great group of liberty fighters here in Charlotte. We banded together and made this happen.
We did concessions and a raffle. We raised over $2,000. We asked all the speakers to bring something to put into a basket and we raffled off the basket. Many brought books autographed, and one person donated some silver. Gary Johnson gave the winner a VIP ticket to dinner with him.
I feel that this was a great success. If anyone needs any help with any rallies, feel free to contact me!
Col. Carozza: “General Caldwell had the request withdrawn and postponed until after the election and then, after the election, tried to intimidate his subordinates into a consensus that it need not move forward at all."
"How could we make this request with elections coming?" Caldwell reportedly said, referring to President Obama. "He calls me Bill."
The fact that military leadership violated the law to benefit a political party is makes this is the most serious and damaging scandal to ever happen under President Barack Obama's watch. Wounded American soldiers, Afghans civilians and children, suffered under these conditions and continued to suffer because of a sick, political calculation to benefit a political party.
Long before, and fully independent of, anything Congress did, President Obama made clear that he was going to preserve the indefinite detention system at Guantanamo even once he closed the camp. President Obama fully embraced indefinite detention — the defining injustice of Guantanamo — as his own policy.
In February, 2009, the Obama DOJ told an appellate court it was embracing the Bush DOJ’s theory that Bagram detainees have no legal rights whatsoever, an announcement that shocked the judges on the panel hearing the case.
The central theme of Greenwald’s exhaustive piece is that Barack Obama has not — contrary to his rhetoric — taken any meaningful steps (or, by all appearances, even thought any meaningful thoughts) toward ending the abuses of Guantanamo Bay.
Worse, as Greenwald adds:
In fact, Obama’s “close GITMO” plan — if it had been adopted by Congress — would have done something worse than merely continue the camp’s defining injustice of indefinite detention. It would likely have expanded those powers by importing them into the U.S.
Read the full takedown of Obama's lies about his intentions toward Guantanamo Bay here.
Millions of Iranians are struggling to afford basic food necessities thanks to a spike in food prices caused by US sanctions. Those sanctions continue to be implemented despite the fact that "Washington admits Iran has no weapons program and has not made the decision to start one."
Many recent Department of Defense press releases stress the growing alarm shared by President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, and Martin Dempsey over the continued brutality of the Assad regime in Syria. The last time the DoD showed such “deep concern” over the deteriorating situation in any country was regarding Libya. The concern over Libya was soon followed by Operation Odyssey Dawn and further intervention by the United Nations in the Libyan Civil War. Given the track record of NATO and the United Nations, it’s reasonable to assume that these powers will intervene in the civil war in Syria.
There are several possible outcomes from the current Syrian conflict. So far at least 19,000 people have been killed in Syria, 9,000 of them being combatants from the loyalist army and the rebel forces combined, and the fighting continues. Given the fanatical offensives waged by rebel guerrillas deep within Damascus in the last few days, the Syrian rebel armies may very well defeat the loyalist army and oust the Assad regime. Unfortunately one obstacle may remain in their path: the Russian army, deployed in support of the regime. If the Russians get involved then they’ll use the same force and brutality they used in Afghanistan, in Chechnya, and in Georgia, neither stopping until humiliating defeat or total victory. They may very well crush the rebels unless the Syrian National Council (rebel government) seeks help.
U.S. aircraft, including fighter-bombers, at Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti.
If you were wondering where in the future would America send its sons and daughters to fight in expensive and needless wars, look no further than the so-called "Dark Continent" of Africa. TomDispatch investigative reporter Nick Turse reports:
Unbeknownst to most Americans, the Pentagon has set up bases all over Africa, in places like Nzara, South Sudan; Manda Bay, Kenya; and Dire Dawa, Ethiopia. In my latest article, I’ve tried to map out these American outposts and the shadow supply network, which the military privately calls “the New Spice Route,” that has been created to service them. The Pentagon told me that its operations in Africa were small and limited in nature. My research suggests otherwise.
Turse's full report details just how expansive the build-up has been and how most of it is being done without the knowledge or consent of the American public. Privately dubbed as "the New Spice Route" by the American military, the extensive infrastructure crisscrossing the continent will not be used to transfer goods or spices, but weapons and military equipment. It is a logistical web made up of spy planes, drones, and U.S. ground troops. And all of it for the American Empire's secret war against secret enemies funded by the blood of innocent people and American wealth.
The occupation of Africa, albeit a small one currently, will no doubt lead to future conflicts which will pit the United States against Africans rightly resisting Western imperialism. It looks like we have yet learn from our mistakes and we are blindly, eagerly making the same ones in Africa. While China busies itself with trade and beneficial relationships with African countries, the United States is creating a future battlefield into which to waste even more resources.
Many recent 
U.S. aircraft, including fighter-bombers, at Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti.
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