An explosion of criticism had erupted in Congress and the news media in response to President Trump’s decision to withdraw a small contingent of US troops stationed in northern Syria. Those forces served as a (mostly symbolic) barrier to Turkey’s ambitions to conduct a military offensive against Syrian Kurdish forces there. Ankara has now initiated that offensive. Republican hawks and Trump’s automatic adversaries among congressional Democrats are united in excoriating his decision. Much of...

Comments from Sen. Mark Warner responding to reports that Attorney General Bill Barr asked a number of world governments for help in refuting the investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 U.S. election were met with ridicule Friday as observers mocked the suggestion that the CIA would never do such a thing.Warner, a Virginia Democrat, made the remarks to NBC in an interview over the latest revelations in the still-unfolding whistleblower scandal that has triggered an impeachment...

In a Friday The Intercept editorial, Mehdi Hasan wrote that President Donald Trump “and his acolytes” have been “banging their anti-Semitic drum in plain sight” since United States House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s September 24 announcement of an impeachment inquiry in regard to Trump. But, Hasan then offers no substantial evidence to back this bold claim. The first pittance Hasan presents as supposed backing for his claim is a September 28 Twitter post from Trump. In the tweet,...

Ever since the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it has been an article of faith that Americans should thank the troops for their service in those two countries. Yet, with the exception of libertarians and few leftists, the fact is that during the two decades of death, injury, suffering, destruction, and out of control federal spending and debt that threatens to send the government into bankruptcy, the overwhelming majority of Americans never openly demanded that the US government bring...

US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out US troops from northern Syria has been met with bipartisan outrage, calling it a “betrayal” of the Kurds. Wait till the regime-changers hear the obvious solution to keep them safe. As some two dozen US troops stationed in northwestern Syria began to withdraw on Monday, reports began coming in of Turkish airstrikes against Kurdish targets. Ankara is apparently calling the operation “Fountain of Peace.” Officially, the goal is to establish a “safe...

Start with the initial headline, in the story the Washington Post “broke” on September 18th: TRUMP’S COMMUNICATIONS WITH FOREIGN LEADER ARE PART OF WHISTLEBLOWER COMPLAINT THAT SPURRED STANDOFF BETWEEN SPY CHIEF AND CONGRESS, FORMER OFFICIALS SAY The unnamed person at the center of this story sure didn’t sound like a whistleblower. Our intelligence community wouldn’t wipe its a** with a real whistleblower. Americans who’ve blown the whistle over serious offenses by the federal government...

Since September 17, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has pumped billions of dollars into the repurchasing (repo) market, the first such intervention since 2009. The Fed has announced that it will continue to inject as much as 75 billion dollars a day into the repo market until November 4.The repo market provides a means for banks that are temporarily short of cash to obtain short-term (usually one day) loans from other banks. The Fed’s interventions were a response to a sudden cash...

There are some serious questions around the Biden family involvement in the Ukraine that the media have not picked up on. The first regards the ownership of the company which hired Joe Biden's son Hunter for an exorbitant amount of money while Joe Biden ran the US Ukraine policy. The second question is about the firing of the Viktor Shokin, the former Prosecutor General of the Ukraine. Trump accuses Joe Biden of having intervened in favor of his son's sponsor to get Shokin fired. The timeline...

The debate over what actually occurred on 9/11 and, more to the point, who might have been behind it, continues to preoccupy many observers worldwide. There is considerable legitimate concern that the commission that reviewed the incident engaged in a cover-up designed either to excuse a catastrophic failure on the part of the United States’ national security apparatus, or even connivance of federal agencies in the attack itself. And then there is the issue of possible foreign government...

The controversy swirling around the phone conversation between the US President Donald Trump and Ukraine President Vladimir Zelensky regarding the business interests of former vice-president Joe Biden’s son is having a salutary effect on the conflict in Ukraine. The US Special Representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker has resigned from his official position once it transpired that his name appeared in the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s dealings with Zelensky. (Meanwhile, Trump’s personal...

When you’re several decades older than Greta Thunberg, her impassioned warning of impending doom hits you differently than it may college students or early twentysomethings just a few years older than she. In a word, it sounded “familiar.” I’m not just talking about the climate change movement, nor exclusively about the left side of the political spectrum. I’ve been hearing about impending doom that can only be averted by massive increases in the size and scope of government my whole life,...

I confess that I still don’t get what exactly is going to be the particular offense for which President Trump is going to be impeached. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor of impeaching Trump and removing him from office, but only for grave crimes, such as waging war illegally (i.e., without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war), wreaking death, suffering, and destruction in those wars, committing countless assassinations, and violating provisions in the Bill of...

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” — James Madison Eventually, all military empires fall and fail by spreading themselves too thin and spending themselves to death. It happened in Rome. It’s happening again. At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a...

Photo: White HouseThe news is dominated by “the whistleblower,” the CIA officer who reported to the CIA Inspector General (IG) that President Donald Trump may have committed a crime during a conversation with the president of Ukraine. I’ve been fascinated by the story for a couple of reasons. First, as a whistleblower and a former CIA officer, I know what must have been going through the guy’s mind as he was coming to the decision to make a report on the president of the United States. That...

Notice something important about the hoopla regarding President’s Trump withholding of US foreign aid to Ukraine while he was requesting Ukrainian officials to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden for possible corruption: Nobody in Washington, D.C., or within the establishment press is questioning the concept of foreign aid itself. Foreign aid has become such an established and accepted way of inducing foreign regimes to comply with the dictates of US officials that the thought of...