Showing posts with label — Daniel McAdams (@DanielLMcAdams). Show all posts
Showing posts with label — Daniel McAdams (@DanielLMcAdams). Show all posts

Friday, April 19, 2024

2017: Huge difference with a private company [doing airline security versus the TSA] is that the people searching you and the people pawing you would not have the equivalent of diplomatic immunity.


The interview is from November 22, 2017.  

Not many congressmen were willing to say that the responsibility should be on the airlines themselves.  

Huge difference with a private company is that the people searching you and the people pawing you would not have the equivalent of diplomatic immunity.  It's almost impossible to sue a federal agent who violates your Constitutional rights.  And that's a huge Pandora's box.  

2:49. It's actually gotten a lot more intrusive thanks to the guidelines that the TSA is using and going back to the question of private verses Federal a huge difference with a private company is that the people searching you the people pawing you would not have the equivalent of diplomatic immunity it's almost impossible to sue a federal agent who violates your constitutional rights and that's a huge Pandora's Box for not getting abused at the airport because federal agents the TSA is you know notified that they're allowed to grab you squeeze you there there's a lawsuit that's coming down a federal judge just to prove it a few months ago it's an airline pilot who got jammed in the groin punched in the groin basically by a a TSA agent out of Dulles Airport and the TSA tried to get the federal judge to dismiss his lawsuit who said his rights were violated the TSA said instead of filing the suit with the guy could have done is simply called in the TSA contact center and left a complaint this is the type of remedy the TSA thinks that the American people deserve after they get heavily abused by federal agents.  

Thursday, November 2, 2023

Iran of today is not the Iran of the 1980s

32:20. Best and worst case scenarios as you see them. 

Well, we have a Speaker of the House who went on Hannity and urged the Israelis to attack Iran.  That's not a good idea, and these guys aren't always the smartest bulbs in the bunch.  And I would say definitely he's not, but like you say the world is different now.  And if you have an Israel attacking Iran, the Russians now have an increasingly potent alliance with Iran, let's put it that way.  Plus, the Russians feel themselves very vulnerable in Syria.  They, in fact, just moved a thousand more troops into Syria.  They have a base there in Tartarus and other facilities in Syria.  If Israel attacks Iran, there's also going to be an effort to finish the business in Syria.  That's what the neocons want more than anything else is to finish the business in Syria.  So if the Israelis listen to the neocons in the US, then they're going to find the worst case scenario probably for everyone, which is getting Iran involved getting Hamas even more involved from wherever they are now and in getting the rest of the Arab world.  Now, I don't Erdogan, I think there's a lot of talking and I think he talks out of both sides of his mouth, but he has an enormous Sunni constituency in Turkey.  His base are religious Muslims in Turkey, and he gave a fiery speech over the weekend about you know "We need to go into Gaza and take care of these guys and save our people."  Now I think a lot of it was just a lot of hot rhetoric; nevertheless, it's going to be hard to contain, as you point out, hundreds of millions of people in that vicinity that are going to be inflamed.  You can't kill them all even with their nukes.  

Thursday, October 19, 2023

"If our bases are not for containing the Soviet Union, then maybe they're for interdicting drugs, or maybe it's for threatening Iran, or maybe it's for providing security for some pipeline we're building to cut the Russians out of the Caspian Sea, "

Posobiec's interview doesn't start until the 11:00 mark, so simply fast forward through all the hype and advertisement.  

Scott Horton's Show.   

AntiWar.

Posobiec opens with a reference to John Mearsheimer.

Horton magnificently refers to Pat Buchanan [articles listed @ Lew Rockwell and books listed here] to answer Posobiec's question about "How did we get here with 2 major war fronts, Ukraine and now Israel?" In the 1990s, he ran for president.  He was Ronald Reagan's, first Nixon's, and then Ronald Reagan's speechwriter, CNN and then MSNBC host.  He ran against Bush, Sr. in the primaries in 1992 and later switched to the Reform Party.  He wrote this incredible book, A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny, 1999.

And Jack, at the end of the Cold War 30 years ago, the Soviet Union ceased to exist on Christmas Day, 1991, a major section of the Conservative and Libertarian movement especially that said, 

The Cold War is over.  The emergency is over.  World communism is dead.  Now it's time to end our empire and bring our troops home from around the world.  And let Europe and Asia take care of their own security needs as Ronald Reagan's Ambassador to the UN, Jean Kirkpatrick, who was herself a Neo-Conservative hawk, said, "Now, we can be a normal country in a normal time.  Now we can shed the burdens of superpower status and seek to preserve our own liberty in our own society here at home. 

And instead, the National Security establishment refused to just get a real job.  And they found reasons to expand America's footprint in the Middle East, first, with Iraq War I, and the rest with the Bill Clinton Doctrine and Iraq War 1.5 through the 1990s.  And, of course, NATO expansion in Eastern Europe, also the build-up in Asia, but we'll leave that aside for now.  

14:15  No coincidence at all, and no conspiracy either.  There are books about it, New York Times all about it.  It was Bruce Jackson, Executive Vice President from Lockheed Martin Murrieta who founded the Committee for NATO Expansion and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.  This is basic economics, basic rent-seeking by government contractors.  Doesn't matter whether it's the military or any other government program.  They would rather get paid with tax money than have to compete in the marketplace.  And that was just what happened.  And not just them, but the National Security bureaucracy themselves, of course, the generals and all the spies at the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA), and all these guys . . . no one wants to give up their fiefdom.  If our bases are not for containing the Soviet Union, then maybe they're for interdicting drugs, or maybe it's for threatening Iran, or maybe it's for providing security for some pipeline we're building to cut the Russians out of the Caspian Sea, or some other project, anything but coming home.  

15:21  And so what they did was that they got us into the Terror War, fought it for 20 years and don't have a single thing to show for it.