Here's Why (And How) The Government Will "Borrow" Your Retirement Savings

 

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

According to financial research firm ICI, total retirement assets in the Land of the Free now exceed $23 trillion.

$7.3 trillion of that is held in Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs).

That’s an appetizing figure, especially for a government that just passed $19 trillion in debt and is in pressing need of new funding sources.

Even when you account for all federal assets (like national parks and aircraft carriers), the government’s “net financial position” according to its own accounting is negative $17.7 trillion.

And that number doesn’t include unfunded Social Security entitlements, which the government estimates is another $42 trillion.

The US national debt has increased by roughly $1 trillion annually over the past several years.

The Federal Reserve has conjured an astonishing amount of money out of thin air in order to buy a big chunk of that debt.

But even the Fed has limitations. According to its own weekly financial statement, the Fed’s solvency is at precariously low levels (with a capital base of just 0.8% of assets).

And on a mark-to-market basis, the Fed is already insolvent. So it’s foolish to think they can continue to print money forever and bail out the government without consequence.

The Chinese (and other foreigners) own a big slice of US debt as well.

But it’s just as foolish to expect them to continue bailing out America, especially when they have such large economic problems at home.

US taxpayers own the largest share of the debt, mostly through various trust funds of Social Security and Medicare.

But again, given the $42 trillion funding gap in these programs, it’s mathematically impossible for Social Security to continue funding the national debt.

This reality puts the US government in rough spot.

It’s not like government spending is going down anytime soon; it already takes nearly 100% of tax revenue just to pay mandatory entitlements like Social Security, and interest on the debt.

Plus the government itself estimates that the national debt will hit $30 trillion within ten years.

Bottom line, they need more money. Lots of it. And there is perhaps no easier pool of cash to ‘borrow’ than Americans’ retirement savings.

$7.3 trillion in US IRA accounts is too large for them to ignore.

And if you think it’s inconceivable for the government to borrow your retirement savings, just consider the following:

1) Borrowing retirement funds is becoming a popular tactic.

Forced loans have been a common tactic of bankrupt governments throughout history.

Plus there’s recent precedent all over the world; Hungary, France, Ireland, and Poland are among many governments that have resorted to ‘borrowing’ public and private pension funds.

2) The US government has already done this with federal pension funds.

During the multiple debt ceiling fiascos since 2011, the Treasury Department resorted to “extraordinary measures” at least twice in order to continue funding the government.

What exactly were these extraordinary measures?

They dipped into federal retirement funds and borrowed what they needed to tide them over.

In fact, the debt ceiling debacles were only resolved because the Treasury Department had fully depleted available retirement funds.

3) They’ve been paving the way to borrow your retirement savings for a long time.

Two years ago the government launched a new initiative to ‘help Americans save for retirement.’

It’s called MyRA. And the idea is for people to invest retirement savings ‘in the safety and security of US government bonds’.

Since then they’ve gone on a marketing offensive involving the President, Treasury Secretary, and other prominent politicians.

(Most recently Nancy Pelosi published an Op-Ed in the San Francisco Chronicle a few days ago promoting the program.)

They’ve also proposed a number of legislative reforms to ‘encourage’ American businesses to sign their employees up for MyRA.

Just last week, Congress introduced the “Making Your Retirement Accessible”, or MyRA Act, which would charge a penalty to employers whose workers don’t have a retirement account.

The proposed penalty is $100. Per worker. Per day.

Imagine a small business with, say, 10 employees who don’t have retirement accounts. The penalty to Uncle Sam would be a whopping $30,000 PER MONTH.

There’s a word for this. It’s called extortion.

Obviously when facing a $30,000 monthly penalty, an employer will pick the easiest option.

Given the absurd amount of government regulation on the rest of the financial industry, MyRA is the fastest choice.

This isn’t about fear or paranoia. It’s about facts.

And the reality is that the government in the Land of the Free is moving in the direction of borrowing more and more of your retirement savings.

If you still remain skeptical, remember that last year the government stole more from its citizens through Civil Asset Forfeiture than thieves in the private sector.

Or that just 45-days ago a new law went into effect authorizing the government to strip you of your passport if they believe in their sole discretion that you owe them too much tax.

No judge. No jury. No trial. They just confiscate your passport.

DONALD J. TRUMP RESPONDS TO THE LIES OF SENATOR CRUZ AND WARNS OF LEGAL ACTION

- FEBRUARY 15, 2016 -

Ted Cruz is a totally unstable individual. He is the single biggest liar I’ve ever come across, in politics or otherwise, and I have seen some of the best of them. His statements are totally untrue and completely outrageous. It is hard to believe a person who proclaims to be a Christian could be so dishonest and lie so much.

Cruz said I would be appointing a liberal judge when in fact I will appoint a great conservative and I am the only candidate who has gone so far, at the debate, as to suggest two individuals I feel would best represent the conservative values we need to protect: William “Bill” Pryor Jr. and Diane Sykes.

Cruz says I am pro-choice, when in fact I am staunchly pro-life and have been for a long time. Like Ronald Reagan, on many issues, I have evolved.

Cruz says I am in favor of ObamaCare, when in fact I have spoken about repealing and replacing this disaster of a system at every speech throughout my campaign and since it’s inception. Meanwhile, Cruz was responsible for getting Bush to put in the judge that failed to vote against ObamaCare twice.

Cruz says I will try to take away your second amendment rights, when I am one of the strongest proponents of the right to bear arms and I say so in every speech that I have made for years. I am a proud member of the NRA and so are my sons.

Cruz has become unhinged and is lying with the hopes that his statements will go unchecked until after the election and he will save his failing campaign.

In Iowa, Cruz told thousands of Ben Carson voters that Dr. Carson had left the race and to instead vote for Ted Cruz. He apologized when the race was over. Likewise, his fraudulent voter violation form sent to Iowa voters. If Ted is going to continue to lie with such desperation, I have no choice but to fight back.

One of the ways I can fight back is to bring a lawsuit against him relative to the fact that he was born in Canada and therefore cannot be President. If he doesn’t take down his false ads and retract his lies, I will do so immediately. Additionally, the RNC should intervene and if they don’t they are in default of their pledge to me.

I am the strongest on the borders and I will build a wall, and it will be a real wall. I am strongest on illegal immigration, strongest on ISIS, strongest on the military and I will take care of our Vets. I will end common core and preserve the second amendment. I will renegotiate our trade deals and bring our jobs back to our country. I am the only person who will Make America Great Again.

DONALD TRUMP OP-ED: MY VISION FOR A CULTURE OF LIFE

-

JANUARY 23, 2016 - The Washington Examiner

Let me be clear — I am pro-life. I support that position with exceptions allowed for rape, incest or the life of the mother being at risk. I did not always hold this position, but I had a significant personal experience that brought the precious gift of life into perspective for me. My story is well documented, so I will not retell it here. However, what I will do with the remaining space is express my feelings about life, and the culture of life, as we just marked the 43rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

I build things. There is a process involved in building things. We tap into a lot of disciplines with engineering being one of the most important. The rules for putting structures together are as strict as are the rules of physics. These rules have stood the test of time and have become the path to putting together structures that endure and are beautiful. America, when it is at its best, follows a set of rules that have worked since our Founding. One of those rules is that we, as Americans, revere life and have done so since our Founders made it the first, and most important, of our "unalienable" rights.

Over time, our culture of life in this country has started sliding toward a culture of death. Perhaps the most significant piece of evidence to support this assertion is that since Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Count 43 years ago, over 50 million Americans never had the chance to enjoy the opportunities offered by this country. They never had the chance to become doctors, musicians, farmers, teachers, husbands, fathers, sons or daughters. They never had the chance to enrich the culture of this nation or to bring their skills, lives, loves or passions into the fabric of this country. They are missing, and they are missed.

The Supreme Court in 1973 based its decision on imagining rights and liberties in the Constitution that are nowhere to be found. Even if we take the court at its word, that abortion is a matter of privacy, we should then extend the argument to the logical conclusion that private funds, then, should subsidize this choice rather than the half billion dollars given to abortion providers every year by Congress. Public funding of abortion providers is an insult to people of conscience at the least and an affront to good governance at best.

If using taxpayer money to facilitate our slide to a culture of death were not enough, the 1973 decision became a landmark decision demonstrating the utter contempt the court had for federalism and the 10th Amendment. Roe v. Wadegave the court an excuse to dismantle the decisions of state legislatures and the votes of the people. This is a pattern that the court has repeated over and over again since that decision. Roe v. Wade became yet another incidence of disconnect between the people and their government.

We are in the middle of a presidential political cycle and votes will be cast in just days. The citizens of this nation will have the chance to vote for candidates who are aligned with their individual worldviews. It is my hope that they will choose the builder, the man who has the ability to imagine the greatness of this nation. The next president must follow those principles that work best and that reinforce the reverence Americans hold for life. A culture of life is too important to let slip away for convenience or political correctness. It is by preserving our culture of life that we will Make America Great Again.

http://www.donaldjtrump.com/media/donald-trump-op-ed-my-vision-for-a-culture-of-life

High Drama in US Supreme Court Death/Murder/Disappearance

The "reported" death of Supreme Court Judge Antonin Scalia has all the drama of the John Grisham novel The Pelican Brief...and more! The Death of Antonin Scalia: Chaos, Confusion and Conflicting Reports https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/texas-tv-station-scalia-died-of-a-heart-attack/2016/02/14/938e2170-d332-11e5-9823-02b905009f99_story.html - Scalia was found dead in a hunting lodge owned and operated by "Bad Guy" Operative John Poindexter. - Scalia's death was unexpected and surrounded with controversy. - Both local judges that served as Justice of the Peace were "out of town" so Presidio County Judge Cinderela Guevara pronounced Scalia dead of natural causes without seeing the body...just a phone call from the "officials" on site. - There were conflicting reports about whether an autopsy should have been performed. - A manager at the El Paso funeral home where Scalia’s body was taken said that his family made it clear they did not want one...really? So next they will likely cremate the body and say there's nothing else that can be done. Case closed. So these question will remain unanswered: Did he die of natural causes? Was he murdered? Did he go to 'The Island" where Enron's Ken Lay is currently spending his retirement years? We will never know. Timing of this could not be more advantageous for the Bad Guys as we now have a split Supreme Court with 4 Conservative Judges and 4 Liberal Judges...meaning a tie on everything...meaning nothing can be done except hear the cases again. Expect months and years of gridlock on ANYTHING going before the Supreme Court. The battles are heating up as the world falls apart. Stay in your bunkers!! Bix Weir www.RoadtoRoota.com PS - It's all in book 3 if you are interested. Watch for SILVER to EXPLODE higher in the next few weeks...yes - WEEKS! Book 3 "The Road Awakens' by Bix Weir http://www.roadtoroota.com/public/centeruBook_IIIuBRThe_Road_Awakenscenter.cfm

Book Review: Nobody Died at Sandy Hook (2015)

February 13, 2016 by MHB Administrator • Guest Posts

It was a FEMA drill to promote gun control
Edited by Jim Fetzer, PhD.

Brian Wright
The Coffee Roaster
(November 27, 2015)

… and on 11/19/2015 Mr. Fetzer’s book was banned from the Amazon catalog, one month after initial acceptance and posting there.

“Faking a school shooting to instill fear into a population for political purposes is an act of terrorism, where it has become clear that this instance was brought to us by officials at every level of Connecticut government from the teachers and reporters to the State Police and the Newtown School board to the Governor and the Attorney General and the President himself. And this is the ugly legacy of Barack Hussein Obama.”

Review of an Important Book that Amazon Refused to Publish

This story first came my way by way of Mike Adams and his report that Amazon was getting into the book banning business with this particular title. Which to me proved that whatever the book’s point was it was worth looking into. [The authors made it easy by publishing the book in pdf format and making freely available here… and many other locations.] So I have read the book and digested its essentials. While it is a poorly edited and poorly formatted work—as if the authors did a core dump from various citizen researcher Web pages—the information is bona fide.

To an epistemological certainty, Sandy Hook was not real, nobody real died. Sandy Hook was a FEMA drill with the purpose of generating support for an extreme gun control and federal power agenda. This review will simply catalog the main factual data that demonstrates the certainty.

*489 students, minus 20 = 469 students, plus 70 staff and teachers. Nowhere to be found, no evacuation.

*The benefits to those who participated in the Sandy Hook hoax have been substantial. The donation sites created by “families of the victims” have hauled in over $27,000,000 or in excess of $1,000,000 per ‘family.’

Was Sandy Hook Elementary School (SHES) operational on December 14, 2012, or had it long been abandoned?

1. In an interview with (Wolfgang) Halbig on Truth Radio Show on March 21, 2014, Infowars reporter Dan Bidondi said (5:45 mark), “The school’s been closed down for God knows how long. [Neighbors] can’t understand why there were kids in that building because it was condemned.”
2. Reports of SHES being contaminated with asbestos. requiring expensive repairs
3. Photographic evidence of an abandoned school
4. Absence of handicapped parking spaces and signage
5. Absence of Internet activity 2008-2012
6. Wolfgang Halbig’s Freedom of Information hearing

• Among our most important discoveries has been the FEMA manual for the Sandy Hook event (Appendix A), which specifies that a rehearsal will be conducted on December 13, 2012, with the event going “LIVE” on the 14th…

These photographs–day after the shooting–provide further substantiation of my inference that the school had been closed by 2008, which I published (with Amanda) in “Sandy Hook Elementary School: Closed in 2008, a stage in 2012”. The building is covered with moss and grime, with many indications of repairs left undone.

Exhibit (1): Absence of compliance with Americans with Disabilities Act
Exhibit (2): Presence electrical hazards for teachers, staff and students alike
Exhibit (3): Absence of wheelchair accessibility and of proper maintenance
Exhibit (4): Presence of stored items of every shape, kind and description

The photograph to which Shannon Hicks, Associate Editor of The Newtown Bee, refers is one that I (with Dan Cady) published in “The Sandy Hook ‘Smoking Gun’: Game, Set, Match!”, which seems to be one in a series of staged photographs.

There was no actual identification of any of the dead.

Here are the 10 solid points that show Sandy Hook was a hoax.

1. Proof of death has been suppressed

Twenty-eight people allegedly died: 27 children and adults, including Adam Lanza, at the school, and his mother, Nancy Lanza, in her home at 36 Yogananda Street, Newtown. However, there is no direct proof of anyone’s death: no photographic evidence or video footage was released to confirm the official story that these 28 persons actually died. In fact, no video surveillance footage shows anything—not even Adam shooting out the front plate-glass window or walking through the halls like Rambo, even though the school had supposedly updated its security system at the start of the 2012–2013 academic year.

2. Emergency protocols were not followed

There is no evidence of any frantic effort to save lives or remove bodies to hospitals. Instead the scene outside the school looked calm and largely bloodless—with police and other personnel milling around casually and a severe shortage of dead or injured victims. One Sandy Hook researcher decided to call Lt. Paul Vance to ask who cleaned up the blood, which would have been considered a bio-hazard, and got the reply, “What blood?” “Kelley from Tulsa” discusses this with James Fetzer on the “The Real Deal” on December 9, 2013.18 Kelley was onto a real issue: under the EPS’ Medical Waste Tracking Act of 1988, a paper trail must kept by all parties involved in the cleanup and must be tracked all the way to the incinerator with names and dates.

3. Drill protocols were followed instead

The Sandy Hook “massacre” appears to have been an Integrated Capstone Event (ICE), an exercise run by FEMA to coordinate federal, state and local emergency response teams in the case of a mass-casualty event.32 As such, it would have utilized actors and media partners to simulate a tragedy in order to train participants, and also to observe the reaction of the citizenry.

4. There was foreknowledge of the event

The Connecticut state emergency system was taken over long before the “massacre” occurred, with a frequency change implemented five hours in advance of the “shooting.” Normal police and EMS dispatch protocol, using the Alpha Phonetic System for communications between officers and dispatchers, was replaced with staged transmissions by non-trained personnel.33 In addition, tweets about the shooting began before it occurred,34 a tribute was apparently uploaded one month before the event, and web pages honoring the victims, including a Facebook page R.I.P. Victoria Soto, were established before they had “officially” died (Figure 15).

5. There were contradictory reports about the weapons

Perhaps “The Top Prize for Fantastical Reporting” goes to Fox News, however, which announced that a 12-gauge shotgun along with two magazines containing 70 rounds of Winchester 12-gauge shotgun rounds had been found in the glove compartment of Adam Lanza’s Honda Civic—that’s right, in the glove compartment.

6. Adam Lanza cannot have done the shooting

Adam Lanza , reportedly a frail young man weighing 112 pounds with Asperger’s Syndrome, is said to have carried massive weaponry on his person when he shot his way into the Sandy Hook school and proceeded to kill 26 people and then himself. This after he supposedly killed his mother before driving to the school. It should of course be noted that Adam Lanza was initially listed in the Social Security Death Index as having died on December 13, 2012, one day before the alleged shooting.

7. Key participants displayed inappropriate behavior

There are many bizarre media reports and interviews of those associated with the “shooting.” Many of the participants seem to be actors (or intelligence operatives): e.g. Medical Examiner Wayne Carver, Robbie Parker, families on green-screen Anderson-Cooper, school nurse, Principal Dawn Hochsprung, Gene Rosen.

8. Photos at scene and of victims look staged or fake

E.g. Shannon Hicks, shattered glass, photos of children who allegedly died, Parker family photos, Victoria Soto photos, fake unreal person Lanza photos, etc.

9. The crime scene was completely destroyed

As with Ground Zero after 9/11, Sandy Hook Elementary and all the evidence have been completely obliterated; $50 million in CT state funds were allocated for the demolition and rebuilding of Sandy Hook school. This would never have been tolerated if an actual crime had been committed—at least one that was meant to be investigated. The demolition of the school has been completed and rebuilding is in progress.

10. Deceased children sang at the Super Bowl

Research has resulted in a “Sandy Hoax Surprise,” a convincing youtube video by QKultra identifying eight alleged Sandy Hook victims and six brothers of victims singing in the Newtown children’s choir at the 2013 Super Bowl, February 3, 2013.

*According to the United States Social Security Administration’s Death Master File, nobody died at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012.

*ALL of the identities of the “children victims” of the supposed Sandy Hook massacre, are purely fictitious identities, with no record of either birth or death. As to the adult “victims”, the only one with an identity possibly verifiable from the intact SSD Master File, is Victoria G. Soto. The other identities may or may not have been assumed by real people at some time; but the identities themselves are nevertheless fictitious. Secondary copies of the Master File, or perhaps earlier versions, appear to have been altered or “corrected”, to include the fake identities. Such altered copies appear to be in use by popular genealogy search websites, though inconsistently.

*The situation with regard to Sandy Hook boggles the mind. The Connecticut State Police submitted information to the FBI that asserts 27 people died in Connecticut, but at the same time denies that they died anywhere in Connecticut. That is absurd and revealing. The objective of disinformation is to create enough uncertainty that everything is believable and nothing is knowable. But we have a mountain of proof that the school was closed by 2008 and that no one died there in 2012.

The book concludes with a skewering of the Snopes.com apologia for the official story; connections with other false flag massacres such as Aurora, CO, and Tuscon, AZ; analogies to the London 7/7 Subway Bombings; and then appendices for the FEMA plan, the background of Newtown, CT, a timeline, and an index.

The authors recommend a truth commission to bring light to what happened and bring justice to the people and to the perpetrators of the horrific hoax. But we don’t need that. All we need is a fully empowered special federal people’s grand jury to bring indictments. Someone, one of the authors, needs to write the complaint or petition to make that happen.

First Thoughts on the Probable Murder of Justice Scalia

Posted on February 13, 2016

PINNED TO THE TOP OF THE HOMEPAGE 2/13/2016. SCROLL DOWN FOR NEWEST POSTS.

Tonight, thinking Americans sit in shock and reflect upon the future of the country as the Supreme Court seems destined to rubber stamp a wide array of New World Order globalist initiatives.

My first thought was TEXAS. Scalia “died in his sleep” (that’s what the media is reporting) while in Texas.

Texas is where the power elites send their prominent enemies to be murdered. Once in a while, they want to send a message with their assassinations, but usually it works out better for them to have the cause of death established as a heart attack or some other natural cause.

John F. Kennedy was killed in Texas in a very public way. Allegedly, Scalia died in his sleep, all alone. Was Dick Cheney on the premises? Scalia came to Texas to go hunting. Perhaps Chaney and his crew were hunting Scalia. There’s no way for Scalia to have known that he was the prey, not the animals on the big ranch he was visiting.

In retrospect, Scalia needed a strong security detail of very conservative, Christian, well trusted men. One of his detail should have been a food taster. Not that I expect that an autopsy will show that Scalia was poisoned by food. If he was, it would be by a poison that left no trace.

I’m expecting that the autopsy will take place in Texas, conducted by someone under the control of the Illuminati (call them what you will–the power elites, globalists, oligarchs, etc.) If I were the Scalia family, I’d make sure that an independent autopsy were done, and make sure that whatever evidence of disease within Scalia’s body that is revealed is not planted evidence.

You may remember that Andrew Breitbart dropped dead under mysterious circumstances. I recall an autopsy showed his death was caused by a heart attack. Breitbart’s audience had become too large. He couldn’t be ignored by our rulers, so he was removed. Miraculously, some men who have the truth figured out, men such as Henry Makow, are allowed to live.

Another thought I had was an image of the Clintons and the state of Arkansas littered with the dead bodies of their enemies. Did Scalia make a stray comment about the Hillary email investigation? Is the Supreme Court going to have to make a ruling in that investigation? You just know that Scalia would have voted to fry her sorry butt.

Whoever murdered Scalia, the bet I’d make is that another assassin is taking care of him or already has. A witness who could testify that he killed Scalia on orders from the Clintons (possible), Obama (unlikely as Obama is a puppet), or some unnamed member of the oligarchy, is going to be eliminated quickly.

The ranch’s proximity to the Mexican border brings to mind the idea that the drug cartels had him killed. The problem with that theory is that Mexicans like their assassinations bloody and violent, not stealthy.

Whether Scalia actually died from natural causes or was eliminated, the thing we can agree on is that the Supreme Court no longer stands in the way of the implementation of a wide variety of liberal tyrannical policies and programs.

Weep for America. We’re on step closer to the precipice tonight.

SHARE THIS:

Big Brother wants to be Big Daddy now. - Feds Announce They Will Raise Your Child »

DO NOT COMPLY #TurnOffYourTVs #Trump2016

http://ow.ly/Yinxu

Satanists Rally Behind Socialist Sanders!

Anatomy Of The Deep State: An Open Conspiracy

Feb 11 - What is the "deep state"? Is it a secret national security apparatus that spies on us and operates "black sites" overseas? Some judicial star chamber ruling in secret? Well, partly. But as Mike Lofgren, author of "The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government" points out, the whole truth is comparatively banal. The deep state consists of the multiple layers of government and quasi-government bureaucracies and the myriad of cottage industries they spring up around them, including the military-industrial complex and the election-industrial complex. They operate out in the open and are almost completely overlooked, while Americans instead to turn their attention to the latest election. But elections change very little in Washington with the deep state in the driver's seat:

Coming to Terms With Iraq

written by jacob g. hornberger friday february 12, 2016

 

It seems that Iraq will continue to haunt the American people for the indefinite future. And it should. Including the Persian Gulf intervention, the 11 years of sanctions, the no-fly zones, the post-9/11 invasion and and occupation, and the post-occupation bombing, the U.S. government has killed, injured, and maimed several hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens.

There is also the massive destruction of homes, businesses, automobiles, infrastructure, and other property in Iraq.

There are also the Iraqis who were rounded up, tortured, sexually abused, or executed, including those at Abu Ghraib.

Finally, today there are US presidential candidates who are practically foaming at the mouth in the hope that they will have the opportunity to order US troops to wreak even more death and destruction on Iraq, this time under the rationale of attacking ISIS.

Through it all, the American people have patriotically praised the troops, thanking them for their service in Iraq, expressing gratitude for protecting our rights and freedoms.

There is one significant fact that many Americans simply have not yet come to grips with: Neither the Iraqi government nor the Iraqi people ever attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. In that sense, every single Iraqi who has been killed, injured, or maimed or had his business or home or other property destroyed by US troops was innocent of that wrongdoing.

Until Americans come to grips with that important fact — that the US government has wrongfully killed several hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Iraq, I believe that Iraq will continue to haunt the American people for the rest of their lives.

Think of just the people who were tortured and sexually abused at Abu Ghraib. As they were being subjected to the brutality of the CIA and the Pentagon, one can easily imagine some of them asking, “Why are you doing this to me? What have I done to you to deserve this?”

Of course, the justification that US officials used at the time was that they had invaded Iraq to search for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. But there were always problems with that justification, ones that many Americans still don’t want to deal with.

One, it was the United States and other Western regimes that furnished Saddam Hussein those WMDs. (See here and here.) That took place in the 1980s, when the US government was partnering with Saddam in his war against Iran. The reason the US government delivered those WMDs to Saddam was so that he could kill Iranians with them.

Recall that when US troops finally discovered WMDs in Iraq, buried and rusted out, US officials kept the find secret. Why would they do that? Wouldn’t that have been the perfect opportunity to say, “See, see—we were right!”? The reason they kept the find secret is that they didn’t want Americans to find out that the WMDs had been made in America and knowingly delivered to Saddam as part of the US-Saddam partnership to kill Iranians during the 1980s.

Two, the US government never had any legal authority to invade Iraq to search for WMDs. That’s because the US government was purportedly enforcing UN resolutions when it invaded Iraq to search for WMDs. But only the UN can enforce its resolutions and it did not authorize any invasion to enforce its WMD resolutions, in large part because it’s inspectors had already determined that there were no WMDs to find.

Three, the US government had already killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children with sanctions for the purpose of achieving regime change in Iraq. Recall US Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright’s infamous position that she declared to Sixty Minutes: that the deaths of half-a-million Iraq children from the sanctions were “worth it.” In their post 9/11 fear, Americans blinded themselves to the fact that US officials were using the WMD scare as a way to frighten them into supporting an invasion to accomplish a regime change that the sanctions had failed to accomplished.

Fourth, and perhaps most important, once it was determined that Saddam had been telling the truth and that he had in fact destroyed the WMDs that the US government had delivered to him during the 1980s, Americans continued supporting ten more years of military occupation, a brutal occupation in which countless more Iraqis were killed, tortured, incarcerated, abused, injured, and maimed and in which US bombs destroyed countless more buildings, homes, and infrastructure.

Through the entire occupation, Americans continued thanking the troops for their service in Iraq—glorifying them for defending our rights and freedoms.

Do you see something wrong with that picture?

Soon after the invasion, US officials determined that there were no WMDs — that Saddam had in fact destroyed the WMDs that the US government had delivered to him during the 1980s. The UN had been proven right in its decision not to enforce its resolutions with a military invasion of Iraq.

Yet, the WMDs had been the official justification for the invasion. That’s why Americans had supported it. That’s why US troops had been torturing, killing, and maiming Iraqis and destroying their homes, businesses, and properties.

At that point, the official justification for all that killing and destruction was gone. At that point, there was only one right course of action for US officials to take: apologize for their “mistake,” make amends for the death and destruction they had already wreaked with their “erroneous” invasion, and bring the troops home.

That’s not what they did. Instead, they remained in Iraq for 11 long years, killing, maiming, torturing, injuring, incarcerating, abusing, and humiliating more and more Iraqi people, all with the support of the American people, who by this time knew that the WMD rationale for the invasion had turned out to be bogus.

I repeat an important fact: Every one of those Iraqis who were killed, maimed, tortured, injured, abused, or humiliated had never attacked the United States nor had their government. In that sense, they were entirely innocent victims of US aggression against their country.

Why did US officials go through all the contortions of the WMD scare instead of just invading to effect regime change?

Two reasons: First, they knew that initiating a war against another country for the purpose of effecting regime change was a war crime as per Nuremberg and also pursuant to the laws of the United Nations. Two, they wanted Americans to think that US troops were defending America rather than aggressing against a Third World nation.

The irony in all this is that it was Iraq that was always the defending nation and it was always the US government that was the aggressing nation. It was the US government that was the war criminal the entire time. Under international law and the law set forth at Nuremberg, the Iraqi people had the absolute right to defend themselves from US aggression. Yet, US officials continually referred to Iraqis as the “bad guys” whenever they defended themselves against the foreign troops that had wrongfully invaded and occupied their land and glorified the troops for killing people who were doing nothing more than defending their country from foreign aggression. Would Americans consider themselves to be “bad guys” if they were defending the United States from a foreign invasion?

What has always been so bizarre is how Americans just continued mindlessly thanking the troops for “defending our rights and freedoms” in Iraq. They simply blinded themselves to the fact that our “rights and freedoms” were never threatened by the Iraqi government or the Iraqi people. At the risk of repeating myself, they had never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. All they had done was defend themselves from troops who were instruments of foreign aggression against their country.

ISIS? It’s largely composed of people in the Saddam Hussein regime who were ousted from power in the US regime-change operation. Why should it surprise anyone that they are now trying to get back into power? People who are thrown out of power by foreign aggression don’t usually like that. That’s why there is now a civil war in Iraq, one that has spread to other areas that have been the targets of other US regime-change operations. It’s not the first time that a US regime-change operation has led to a violent civil war. Recall Guatemala, where the CIA’s coup in 1954 led to a decades-long civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Today, many Americans go gaga every time a US presidential candidate says that he’ll order the troops to kill even more Iraqis, this time in the name of destroying ISIS, which is the latest official enemy in the ever-changing cast of official enemies of the US national-security state. Americans would be better off putting such candidates in their place by booing them and by demanding, once and for all, that all US troops be brought home before they kill, maim, torture, or injure even one more person in the Middle East.

Reprinted with permission from the Future of Freedom Foundation.