I just retired after serving 30 years in the US House of Representatives and 16 years before that as a lawyer and Judge. I have to say, of all the great men and women with whom I have worked during my career, Walter Jones was one of the best.There is greater turnover in elective office than ever before, and I served with almost 1500 other Members of the House during my years there. Walter was once rated as the kindest man in Congress, and he certainly was that to me.He and I often sat together...

Days after being smashed with a vicious establishment smear campaign to paint her as an antisemite for accurately criticizing AIPAC, Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is already back on the horse aggressively disrupting the establishment narrative matrix that our rulers have worked so hard to construct for us. Elliott Abrams is a monster. The atrocities that he has facilitated, covered up and whitewashed in Panama, El Salvador, Gaza, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Iraq are utterly unforgivable, and...

Libya is in a state of anarchic turmoil, with various groups fighting each other for control of the country, and as the Wall Street Journal reported last September, “Islamic State is staging a resurgence in chaotic Libya, claiming more than a dozen attacks in the North African country this year and threatening to disrupt the flow of oil from one of the world’s most significant suppliers.” To such mainstream media outlets as the Wall Street Journalthe fact that oil supplies are being disrupted...

The U.S. had called for a high level anti-Iran meeting in Poland. The purpose of the meeting was to bring with its allies and poodles into line with the U.S. agenda on Iran, to press them at least into issuing harsher sanctions. But the Europeans rejected that. The State Department then changed the agenda: “The idea was to have a conference, a ministerial, and basically break our diplomatic isolation on Iran,” said a person familiar with the planning of the event. “It started out as an Iran...

Two days ago, the New York Times carried an article by Times’ journalist Thomas Erdbrink entitled, “For Iran, a Grand Occasion to Bash the US,” which was about Iran’s celebration of the 40th anniversary of its revolution in 1979. The article included the following sentence, “And like some evil doppelgänger, the United States was omnipresent, despite having broken all ties with Iran in 1981.” Unfortunately, Erdbrink failed to point out two things: One, it is understandable why the Iranian...

The latest extraordinary chapter in the bizarre world of Venezuelan politics is playing out before our eyes. After winning the 2018 presidential elections, Nicolás Maduro was inaugurated in January, only for the head of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó -- a man whom, at the time, less than 20 percent of the country had even heard of -- to declare himself President. Guaidó was immediately backed by the governments of the US and UK, with Vice President Mike Pence stating, "Nicolás Maduro is a...

Elite CIA-backed special forces in Afghanistan are leaving a trail of carnage in the country. As such units do not operate under the umbrella of the Department of Defense, they have been given near-impunity despite standing accused of war crimes. Last month, the New York Times cited “senior Afghan and international officials” who said that while most strike forces in Afghanistan have been put under the purview of Afghan intelligence since 2012, two of the most “ruthless” units are “still...

While the de jure role of state sponsored propaganda is to convince a population to adopt a certain line of thinking on the issues of the day, the de facto function of state sponsored propaganda is rather different. In a society in which even a sizeable minority of the public are capable of critical thinking, few will immediately believe everything they are told, even if they can’t quite put their figure on a specific point of contention. Because of that, in educated societies as the Soviet...

Last week’s bipartisan Senate vote to rebuke President Trump for his decision to remove troops from Syria and Afghanistan unfortunately tells us a lot about what is wrong with Washington, DC. While the two parties loudly bicker about minor issues, when it comes to matters like endless wars overseas they enthusiastically join together. With few exceptions, Republicans and Democrats lined up to admonish the president for even suggesting that it’s time for US troops to come home from Afghanistan...

(This is from RPI's weekly newsletter offered free to subscribers. Are you signed up yet?)There is a sad disregard for human life among the neocon regime-changers. The devastation of Iraq, with its million dead, was a mere stepping stone to a "re-making" of the Middle East. A Libya turned into a modern day slave market after neocon-backed "liberation" is off the radar screen. Who cares, right?Syria suffered a half million dead after a US backed jihadist insurgency - strongly backed by the...

Over the last couple of days, you may have seen an image the one above in the news. This is Tienditas International Bridge (Spanish: Puente Binacional Tienditas) on the border between Colombia and Venezuela. I have a feeling that we will be seeing much more of this bridge in the news over the coming days. Venezuela is a country in crisis. More specifically, a presidential crisis. The president since 2013, Nicolás Maduro, was re-elected in 2018, but the election is disputed by the opposition....

US President Donald Trump again this week portrayed his plan to pull troops out of Syria as a “victory homecoming” and “an end to endless wars”. Then, in stepped Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to clarify what’s really going on: it’s a “tactical change” to put Iran in the crosshairs. The purported pullout is not a return of US military from the Middle East, as Trump has been trumpeting with self-congratulations. It’s more a reconfiguration of American military power in the strategically vital...

A second summit meeting for the US and North Korea is reportedly scheduled to take place in Vietnam at the end of the month. Expert opinions on where these negotiations are headed range from the insightful to the incredibly naive, with mainstream media consumers consistently finding themselves in the latter category. Trump supporters believe their president is going to pull off some Art of the Deal wizardry and convince Pyongyang to completely denuclearize, and mainstream Democrats believe...

On Monday, February 5th, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland announced that the 14 countries of the Lima Group — who had actually formed themselves under her direction into this new group on 8 August 2017 in order to overthrow and replace Venezuela’s current President Nicholas Maduro — have now been joined (though she didn’t say to what extent) by the EU, and by 8 other individual countries. She stated: Today, we have been joined by our Lima Group partners, from Argentina, Brazil,...

A day after the US coup attempt in Venezuela the US game plan was already quite obvious: The opposition in Venezuela will probably use access to that 'frozen' money to buy weapons and to create an army of mercenaries to fight a 'civil' war against the government and its followers. Like in Syria US special forces or some CIA 'contractors' will be eager to help. The supply line for such a war would most likely run through Colombia. If, like 2011 in Syria, a war on the ground is planned it will...