Rep. Ron Paul, who recently suspended his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, assured the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Wednesday that “the fight goes on. … I’ve always campaigned for liberty.”
Paul said it’s “irrelevant” to him who wins the election in November, because “whether it’s Obama or McCain, from my point of view, there’s not a whole lot of difference.”
Paul strongly supported the recent Supreme Court decision giving habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo inmates and criticized McCain’s comments on it, saying, “If you’d call that court ruling ‘naive,’ you’d have to call the Founding Fathers naive.”
“We’re looking for trouble,” Paul continued. “Why are we going into these foreign countries arresting people? … There’s more hostility towards us, more enemies than ever before.”
“We don’t understand exactly why the hostility is directed toward us,” Paul continued. “We think it’s being directed toward us because we’re free and prosperous — and it has nothing to do with why there’s a band of criminal, crazy people who want to kill us. … They’re very, very weak, desperate people, and if we don’t understand that and we declare war against the world, all we’re going to do is create a greater threat. Al Qaeda is bigger than ever before.”
Paul then returned to the problem of what to do with the Guantanamo detainees. “The one thing you don’t do is that you assume they’re terrorists,” he stated. “They’re all suspects, and if you don’t have reason to hold them in an American prison, they shouldn’t be there.”
“Why do we have secret prisons around the world?” Paul continued. “Do you think Guantanamo is the only one? … I think it’s a terrible way for a free country and a republic to act. I think we’re violating all the principles that the Founding Fathers tried to put into our Constitution, and we’re just too careless with personal liberty.”
Paul concluded by saying that his new project is campaignforliberty.com and that the rally he intends to hold at the time of the Republican National Convention is already swelling in size. “We insist we have fun, and we’re not going to try to disrupt the convention,” Paul emphasized.
This video is from MSNBC’s Morning Joe, broadcast June 18, 2008.
