An Open Letter to Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter

The "Project for a New American Century" Comes to an End

Dear Mr. Secretary:

I listened with care to your September 30th press briefing about ongoing developments in Syria. It truly was a remarkable performance. Not one word to come out of your mouth was true. Because of establishment news organization complicity, your lies will go unchallenged. That's unfortunate because, unless the American people awaken quickly, we are all at imminent risk of dying by the millions in a nuclear World War of Washington's making.

As you well know, Russia has not committed aggression in Syria. Syria's so-called "civil war" was initiated by a standard "color revolution" destabilization team staffed by US State Department-sponsored NGOs, the CIA, and NATO Special Operations units. The destabilization team stood up, financed, trained and armed a small group of radical Sunni dissidents for the purpose of overthrowing the Assad government. The anti-Assad Coalition (that is, the governments of the US, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and selected NATO nations, most prominently Turkey), then systematically escalated its aggression against Syria and is now illegally engaged in conventional military attacks. Turkey has gone so far as to brazenly move its troops well into Syrian territory. Russia is lawfully responding to a request from the internationally-recognized Syrian government for help in defending itself against a Coalition-sponsored insurrection.

Unfortunately, official lies have become the norm. Washington lies about literally everything. It lies about the unemployment rate, the inflation rate, and the general condition of the economy. Your press briefing continued an unbroken string of official lies about Washington's "regime change" operations. These are acts of criminal aggression under  international law that have sown death and destruction from the Balkans through north Africa and the Middle East to the Ukraine. However, your remarks were uniquely important in one respect: they significantly escalated the demonization campaign against Russia in general and Vladimir Putin in particular. More importantly, in the Ukraine and in Syria, the Coalition is directly threatening vital Russian strategic interests. Russia is not Iraq, Putin is not Saddam Hussein, and the potential for a clash between Russian and Coalition forces is very great. The Coalition's arrogant and foolish aggression has created a dangerous military situation that now poses an existential threat to the lives of millions around the world.

Syria became a primary target because it is allied with Iran and with Russia. For Washington's neocon empire builders, the road to world domination has always run from Damascus through Tehran to Moscow. It is worth noting that the Syrian government is the only one in the region to actively defend the Christian minority against attacks by radical Islamists. Although the Syrian regime is autocratic, Western-educated Bashar al-Assad is a virtual Captain Kangaroo as compared to the hideous "Royal Family" of American ally Saudi Arabia, a gang of brutal thugs which routinely lops off more of its own subjects' heads and hands than does ISIS of its enemies.

Long-held beliefs die hard. After nearly a half-century of Cold War between the former Soviet Union and the United States, many American patriots do not understand how much Russia has changed since the USSR collapsed in 1991, Russia is not the USSR and its government is not Communist. Today Russia is struggling to develop a functioning market-based economy after 74 years of communist tyranny. This struggle has been made much more difficult by a legacy of entrenched corruption and Western-imposed "economic sanctions".

Beyond the economy, there are several other politically-important facts about today's Russia that will come as news to many because the establishment media has not reported them. That failure to inform is not accidental. Conservatives and constitutionalists will be astonished by the extent to which Russia and the United States have swapped positions. In many important respects, Russia now appears to be a more Christian (and perhaps more Free) country than the United States.

Russia and Gun Control

Source: Russia Today, November 19, 2014

In an amendment to its tough gun control laws, the Russian government eases restrictions, allowing citizens to carry licensed weapons for the purposes of ‘self-defense.’

Until now Russian gun enthusiasts were only permitted to carry firearms for hunting or target shooting after obtaining a license through the Interior Ministry. Russian gun licenses are to be renewed every five years, and applicants face strict background checks and are required to take gun safety courses. 

The addendum to the law now lists self-defense as a legally acceptable reason for carrying a weapon.

Russia, Christian Values and Homosexuality

Source: The Washington Times, January 28, 2014

MOSCOW — At the height of the Cold War, it was common for American conservatives to label the officially atheist Soviet Union a “godless nation.”

More than two decades on, history has come full circle, as the Kremlin and its allies in the Russian Orthodox Church hurl the same allegation at the West.

“Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved away from their roots, including Christian values,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a recent keynote speech. “Policies are being pursued that place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan. This is the path to degradation." 

In his state of the nation address in mid-December, Mr. Putin also portrayed Russia as a staunch defender of “traditional values” against what he depicted as the morally bankrupt West. Social and religious conservatism, the former KGB officer insisted, is the only way to prevent the world from slipping into “chaotic darkness.”  

As part of this defense of “Christian values,” Russia has adopted a law banning “homosexual propaganda” and another that makes it a criminal offense to “insult” the religious sensibilities of believers.

Russia and Abortion

Source: National Right To Life News Today, July 1, 2015

The Ministry of Health in Russia has signed an agreement with the Russian Orthodox Church that includes prevention of abortion and provision of palliative care. The agreement signed by Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova and Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church was published on the website of the Synodal Department for ROC [Russian Orthodox Church] Church Charity and Social Service. 

Article 9 of the 21 article agreement establishes cooperation “on the protection of maternal and child health, including reproductive health, promotion of family values and prevention of abortion.”

Because misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies were instrumental in bringing disaster to the world, I would remind readers to keep in mind Mark Twain's powerful and pertinent observation, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

Sincerely,

Frank Brady

This site is not affiliated with any political party. Its goals are to advocate for individual liberty, traditional morality, and domestic peace and to resist all forms of tyranny and statism. It reflects the point of view of a life-long constitutionalist and recovering Republican. If you are among the millions trying to understand what has happened to the GOP, please visit "Who Killed the Republican Party?" If you agree with the content of this post, please feel free to print and distribute it or forward the link to your political representatives at the state and federal level Thank you for your interest.  

The Roseburg Massacre and Washington's Incurable Madness

The blood of the Roseburg massacre victims had not yet dried on the classroom floor before President Obama went into hysterical hyperdrive, demanding that the entire country be declared a "gun free zone" and threatening to bypass Congress to make it happen. Every word he uttered was false.

We've been here before. Immediately following the Sandy Hook massacre, Obama, his posse, and the establishment news media launched a coordinated blizzard of misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies to exploit the shock and horror that tragic event generated ("never let a good tragedy go to waste") in an effort to ram through national gun control legislation. That non-stop 24/7 effort just may have been the greatest public relations miscalculation in political history. The American people's riposte was a stunning act of immediate and unremitting defiance. They queued up for hours to buy virtually every firearm of any type that could be found available for sale in the United States (plus all available ammunition stocks) and placed additional firearms and ammunition orders amounting to a year's worth of manufacturing output!

The anti-gun Left is and has always been completely out of touch with reality. Consider (1) its continued focus on "gun violence" instead of overall violence; (2) its insistence that semi-automatic rifles are "assault weapons;  (3) its continued claim that the U.S. has an unusually high murder rate; and (4) its repeated assertion that the widespread private ownership of firearms is responsible for the murder rate. The facts are readily available to anyone who cares to look for them and they still are not being accurately reported by the establishment media.

• The U.S. homicide rate per 100,000 population has been dropping since 1993 and is now at its lowest level since 1968! Exceptions are cities which have the tightest restrictions on the private ownership of firearms such as Obama's Chicago.  (See FBI-Uniform Crime Reports.) 

• The U.S. homicide rate (murders per 100,000 population) ranks 108th of the 207 countries for which data are reported according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s most recent report (see http://www.unodc.org/). All countries reporting higher murder rates than the U.S. require firearm registration and have very restrictive (virtually prohibitive) licensing requirements. Bear in mind that these data are from “the most recent year reported” and are subject to change as new information is added.

• Gun ownership data comes from http://www.gunpolicy.org/. Although the U.S. leads the world in per capita ownership of firearms, more than one-half of the countries in the world have a higher murder rate than the United States, many of them much higher. If private firearms ownership “causes” murder, the U.S. murder rate should be the highest by far. It’s not even close.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. reported 14,196 murders in 2013, continuing a decline that has been occurring since 1993. To put these data in perspective, had the U.S. experienced El Salvador’s homicide rate, there would have been 218,039 murders and yet private firearms ownership is 15.3 times that of El Salvador! Greenland’s rate applied to our population would have resulted in 60,496 murders. In the face of these data, it is impossible to honestly believe that there is any meaningful correlation between private gun ownership and national murder rates.

It is also absolutely clear that the propensity to commit murder (and the probability of being murdered) is not equally distributed among the U.S. population. Black Americans kill and are killed at eight times the rate observed in the rest of the population. Again, see FBI-Uniform Crime Reports. The effect of this unequal distribution on the national murder rate is enormous. When the black murder rate is “normalized” to those levels observed in the rest of the U.S. population, the U.S. murder rate is cut virtually in half and falls close to rates seen in Western Europe and Canada. These data do not support the idea that there exists any causal relationship between national murder rates and private firearm ownership.

Mass killings at Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Sandy Hook and Roseburg are of a very different type and the perpetrators have very different motivations. Unlike the street killings that account for most U.S. murders in which black Americans are disproportionately both victims and killers, in mass killing incidents the killers tend to be White or Asian male mental patients. There is a reason for that.

Prior to 1968, there were virtually no mass killings in the United States and it was possible for anyone to purchase any legal fire arm with no background check. Guns could be mail-ordered from catalog stores such as Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Wards, JC Penny, or Spiegels and they would be delivered by the U.S. Postal Service. Then, beginning in the decade of the 1970s,  the U.S. experienced a dramatic increase in the number of mass killings. Two factors accompanied that increase and both warrant exploration.

• Throughout the 1970s, mental health care reform emptied out the state mental hospitals and made it much more difficult to have dangerous mental patients involuntarily committed for treatment.

• In 1987, the “anti-depressant” PROZAC was approved and widely prescribed followed by ZOLOFT, PAXIL and other SSRI drugs. Known side effects include suicide ideation and violent behavior. Most—if not all—of the mass killers from 1980 on were taking one or more of these drugs.

The Roseburg tragedy invokes feelings of shock, horror, and great sadness in all of us. It is essential that we identify and understand the true causes. It will be a greater tragedy still if we allow this terrible event to be exploited to advance a dangerous political agenda that will do nothing positive and place all Americans at risk.