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A Massive Scandal: How Assange, His Doctors, Lawyers and Visitors Were All Spied on for the US

A Massive Scandal: How Assange, His Doctors, Lawyers and Visitors Were All Spied on for the US

It sounds like a James Bond movie, but it really happened. Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks journalists and every single lawyer, reporter, politician, artist and physician who visited the founder of WikiLeaks at the Ecuadorian embassy over the last seven years was subjected to systematic espionage. Meetings and conversations were recorded and filmed, and all the information was sent to US intelligence. Sometimes the espionage operations were truly off the wall: at one point spies even planned to...

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The Insider: How National Security Mandarins Groomed Pete Buttigieg and Managed his Future

The Insider: How National Security Mandarins Groomed Pete Buttigieg and Managed his Future

In his quest for front-runner status in the 2020 presidential campaign, Pete Buttigieg has crafted an image for himself as a maverick running against a broken establishment. On the trail, he has invoked his distinction as the openly gay mayor of a de-industrialized Rust Belt town, as well as his experience as a Naval reserve intelligence officer who now claims to oppose “endless wars”. He insists that “there’s energy for an outsider like me,” promoting himself as “an unconventional candidate.”...

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The Afghanistan Fiasco and the Decline and Fall of the American Military

The Afghanistan Fiasco and the Decline and Fall of the American Military

A devastating investigative report was published in the Washington Post on December 9th. Dubbed the “Afghanistan Papers” in a nod to the Vietnam War’s famous “Pentagon Papers,” the report relied on thousands of documents to similarly expose how the US government at the presidential level across three administrations, acting in collaboration with the military brass and civilian bureaucracy, deliberately and systematically lied repeatedly to the public and media about the situation in...

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By impeaching Trump, Democrats have made him more powerful than they could ever imagine

By impeaching Trump, Democrats have made him more powerful than they could ever imagine

From coast to coast, the Resistance is cheering the impeachment of President Donald Trump in the House. They shouldn’t be. For in seeking to destroy him, they have only made him more powerful, and undercut themselves. Let’s not mince words: Wednesday’s vote was the culmination of efforts that began on November 8, 2016, with Trump’s shocking triumph over Hillary Clinton – or maybe even before, on whatever date the FBI actually began investigating the Trump campaign for “Russian collusion” per...

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The Absurdity of Today’s Impeachment Vote Captured in One Tweet

The Absurdity of Today’s Impeachment Vote Captured in One Tweet

On the United States House of Representatives floor today, representatives have lined up to speak in solemn tones about how they are fulfilling of their oaths of office and defending America from grave danger by voting to impeach President Donald Trump.Over at Twitter today, politics writer James Bovard calls rubbish on this morality play taking place in the House. In one tweet he shows the absurdity of the impeachment vote. Bovard writes: If Trump, instead of calling the Ukraine president,...

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Can Recep the Magnificent Sort Out Libya?

Can Recep the Magnificent Sort Out Libya?

This title is not intended to trivialize the very serious nature of the deadly conflict in Libya; the situation is an ever-escalating humanitarian disaster, and has been since US State and NATO destroyed the country in 2011. On December 14th an air cargo transport of Belgian FN arms from Ostend was supplied to Misrata rebels by a United Arab Emirates contractor. Whether the UAE weapons shipment was contracted to undertake an uprising in Misrata prior to Erdogan's clash with Tobruk (Haftar) and...

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Endless Wars and Endless Lies

Endless Wars and Endless Lies

The Washington Post has obtained a “confidential trove of government documents” revealing that “senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” But many of us knew and wrote that the war was unwinnable from the beginning, although none of the Western mainstream media would publicise any such judgement. In 2005 I wrote that...

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What Everyone is Missing About the Afghanistan Papers

What Everyone is Missing About the Afghanistan Papers

If you need more proof that lawmakers in the US couldn’t care less about America’s woeful commitment to human rights abroad—or even care about the public who vote them into office—look no further than the recent Afghanistan papers and the reaction to the publications from Congress. According to the Washington Post, the outlet had obtained 2,000 pages of notes from interviews with more than 400 generals, diplomats, and other officials directly involved in the war. The documents showed that US...

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Afghanistan War – The Crime of the Century

Afghanistan War – The Crime of the Century

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn’t know what we were doing.” So said Gen. Douglas Lute, who oversaw the US war on Afghanistan under Presidents Bush and Obama. Eighteen years into the longest war in US history, we are finally finding out, thanks to thousands of pages of classified interviews on the war published by the Washington Post last week, that General Lute’s cluelessness was shared by virtually everyone involved in the war.What we learned in what is...

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Inspector General report on FBI’s FISA abuse tells us one thing: We need radical reform.

Inspector General report on FBI’s FISA abuse tells us one thing: We need radical reform.

In a bombshell report last week, the Justice Department Inspector General found that the Federal Bureau of Investigation made “fundamental errors” and persistently deceived a secret court to authorize surveilling a 2016 Trump presidential campaign official. Inspector General Michael Horowitz did not find that the FBI’s actions were spurred by political bias but that conclusion is not necessarily shared by Attorney General William Barr. Unfortunately, this is only the latest episode of decades...

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Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires

Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires

“In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.”. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn This week, the venerable Washington Post newspaper revealed a bombshell, 2,000 page, secret Pentagon report detailing the astounding failure of US war strategy in Afghanistan, America’s longest war. Americans have been fed a steady stream of lies about the Afghan War, concluded the Post. So asserted this writer in "American Conservative" magazine in 2003 when the US invaded...

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Those Torture Drawings in the NYT

Those Torture Drawings in the NYT

The New York Times last week published shocking drawings by Guantanamo prisoner Abu Zubaydah showing in graphic detail the types of tortures he endured at the hands of CIA officers and contractors at secret prisons around the world. The drawings were sickening. With a child’s simplicity, they showed the irrational cruelty of the CIA’s torture program, which weakened our country, violated domestic and international law and ended up saying so much more about us, as Americans, than it did about...

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How Not To Be a CIA Propagandist

How enthusiastic should non-interventionists be about what appear to be "popular uprisings" overseas? RPI's Daniel McAdams argues at the Mises Institute's Lake Jackson Symposium that endorsing CIA-backed "regime change" operations overseas makes one responsible for the chaos and destruction when these "color revolts" inevitably devolve into disaster. When the CIA wants to change a regime, real non-interventionists should resist the urge to act as a conveyor belt for US regime propaganda:

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Key Takeaway from Ukraine Peace Talks in Paris is that Zelensky’s Best Friend is Putin

Key Takeaway from Ukraine Peace Talks in Paris is that Zelensky’s Best Friend is Putin

The Paris talks on Ukraine have enabled Putin and Zelensky to meet for the first time. But they have agreed only to kick the can down the road, to agree to disagree, while seeking progress on issues other than the war in Donbass. It would be difficult to exaggerate the weakness of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s position. He is a political novice facing perhaps the most experienced and formidable statesman in the world. Although an intelligent man, the former TV comedian says he likes...

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America’s Unreliable Friends: Today’s Allies Are Tomorrow’s Enemies

America’s Unreliable Friends: Today’s Allies Are Tomorrow’s Enemies

One might postulate that the United States is regularly supporting so-called allies whose very nature will eventually generate blowback that will do terrible damage to actual American interests. The recent example of the mass shooting at the Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida by Saudi Second Lieutenant Mohammed Alshamrani is illustrative. Alshamrani killed three American sailors while three other Saudi students filmed what was taking place, presumably for posting on social media. Though...

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The Fabricated ‘Predicate’ to Spy on the Trump Campaign

The Fabricated ‘Predicate’ to Spy on the Trump Campaign

While Inspector General Michael Horowitz did a pretty fair job of documenting the crimes of the FBI in getting the green light from a Federal Judge to spy on Carter Page as an ostensible agent of the Russians, he utterly failed to investigate the cornerstone (aka the "predicate") for launching this whole sordid affair. That predicate? George Papadopoulos, an obscure foreign policy advisor to the Trump Campaign, reportedly told Australia's High Commissioner to the UK (and Clinton crony),...

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