Ron Paul: Obama Foreign Policy Identical To Bush

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Congressman Ron Paul has slammed Barack Obama’s foreign policy, saying it is identical to that of his predecessor George W. Bush, proving once again that both parties follow the same agenda on major issues.

Paul compared Obama’s pre-election promises to those of his predecessor George W. Bush, who before his election in 2001 guaranteed that the U.S. would not be the policeman of the world or engage in nation building.

Since the inauguration, Obama has sent 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan and and rapidly expanded the Bush-era bombing raids on Pakistan.

“Even though Obama was the so-called peace candidate and was going to bring our troops home from that war in Iraq, I’m afraid there’s evidence now that shows he’s going to pursue the same foreign policy - which was my argument during the campaign, that no matter what happens, both major parties support the same foreign policy, the same monetary policy, the same welfare policy and there’s never really any change,” said the Congressman.

As we reported last month, Obama’s war chest for 2009 alone, when one includes the budget of the defense department, the vast majority of which is related to spending on new fighter jets and other weapons-related programs, is a whopping $805 billion dollars.

Every single component bar one of the DoD budget is up 5-10% compared to 2008, with the budget for “military construction” increasing by a mammoth 19.1%.

Meanwhile, despite public pronouncements by Obama that a plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq is in progress, the details of the agreement actually establish a permanent presence of a sizable occupying force in perpetuity.

In reality, after the “withdrawal” of U.S. troops in 19 months, “Mr. Obama plans to leave behind a “residual force” of tens of thousands of troops to continue training Iraqi security forces, hunt down foreign terrorist cells and guard American institutions,” reported the New York Times.

A senior military officer spelled it out more plainly to the Los Angeles TImes, “‘When President Obama said we were going to get out within 16 months, some people heard, ‘get out,’ and everyone’s gone. But that is not going to happen,’ the officer said.”

Ron Paul also discussed Obama’s monetary policy, noting that every time a new government initiative was announced to supposedly rescue the economy, the stock markets sink.

Paul said that he also did not hesitate to slam Obama’s policies on civil liberties, especially on liberal talk shows that were sympathetic with the new president.

“I don’t think there’s any reason for us to rejoice,” said the Congressman.

Listen to the audio of the interview with Ron Paul below.

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U.S. Army Puts Soldiers on the Street in Alabama in Response to Shootings

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
March 11, 2009

The U.S. Army dispatched soldiers to patrol the streets of Samson, Alabama, a small southern town where a rampaging gunman killed 10 people on Tuesday. This obvious violation of the Posse Comitatus Act prohibiting the federal uniformed services from exercising state and local law enforcement was completely ignored by the corporate media with the exception of Reuters and the London Telegraph (see photo and video).

	From Reuters: “U.S. Army soldiers from Ft. Rucker patrol the downtown area of Samson, Alabama after a shooting spree March 10, 2009.”

On September 30, 2008, the Army Times reported the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, a component of Northern Command, would be “on-call” in response to “natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.” The Army Times article reported the military would be used for “crowd and traffic control” and be issued “nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.” According to the article, “expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one..” (Emphasis added.)

In early 2006, the 109th Congress passed a bill containing controversial provisions granting the president the ability to use federal troops inside the United States in emergency situations. These changes (in Section 1076) were included in the John Warner Defense Appropriation Act for Fiscal Year 2007.

“The story of how Section 1076 became law vivifies how expanding government power is almost always the correct answer in Washington,” James Bovard wrote for the American Conservative on April 23, 2007. “Some people have claimed the provision was slipped into the bill in the middle of the night. In reality, the administration clearly signaled its intent and almost no one in the media or Congress tried to stop it.”

The dispatch of troops to Alabama in response to a local law enforcement situation represents a further erosion of Posse Comitatus and the continued federalization of state and local law enforcement.

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A Telegraph video on the shootings in Alabama propagandizes against the right to own
firearms in the United States and the Second Amendment.

Finally, the corporate media in Britain has exploited the situation in an effort to denigrate the Second Amendment and the Bill of Rights. In a transparent propaganda piece (see video above), the Telegraph states that “mass shootings have become a feature of life in the U.S. in recent years. Guns are widely available for purchase in a country that prides itself on the right to own weapons for self defense and hunting.” Britain has some of the most restrictive gun legislation in the world.

After Britain’s government banned guns in 1997, the rate of violent crime more than doubled. “A recent study of all the countries of western Europe has found that in 2001 Britain had the worst record for killings, violence and burglary, and its citizens had one of the highest risks in the industrialized world of becoming victims of crime,” historian Joyce Lee Malcolm wrote for the fall 2004 issue of Journal on Firearms & Public Policy.