The RPI Challenge

On October 21st there will be a Women’s March on the Pentagon hosted by the Global Women’s Peace Action. My wife and many of our friends will be going and even I will tag along in support in spite of my gender. We participate with some reservations as we have only demonstrated publicly twice since 9/11, once opposing the then about to start Iraq War and once against the annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). All too often demonstrations morph into progressive...

The disappearance of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi in mysterious circumstances while on a visit to his country’s consulate in Istanbul last Tuesday still remains unexplained. The plot is thickening by the day. The latest reports suggest that he may not even be alive. The Istanbul Prosecutor has ordered an investigation. President Recep Erdogan has called Khashoggi a “journalist and friend”. Turkey has a troubled relationship with Saudi Arabia, which has a complicated history dating back...

Gareth Porter paints a dismal picture. Time and again, President Donald Trump indicates he wants to do the right thing: get out Afghanistan, get out of Syria, get out of South Korea. Every time, his national security team – the people he appointed – sends him to “the tank” and hotboxes him with all the reasons he’s wrong and why the US needs to “stay the course” in multiple wars and absurd deployments. If the account of Bob Woodward is to be believed, Trump’s flailing against his own...

The conspiracy to overthrow a sitting US President extends far beyond our own “Deep State.” As I’ve been saying in this space for quite some time, it’s been an international team effort from the beginning. Setting aside the British origins of the obscene “dossier” compiled by “ex”-MI6 agent Christopher Steele, we now have further confirmation of foreign involvement in President Trump’s decision to delay (perhaps indefinitely) the declassification of key Russia-gate documents. While US...

Last week the United States, Mexico, and Canada agreed to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with a new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). Sadly, instead of replacing NAFTA’s managed trade with true free trade, the new USMCA expands government’s control over trade. For example, under the USMCA’s “rules of origin,” at least 75 percent of a car’s parts must be from the US, Canada, or Mexico in order to avoid tariffs. This is protectionism designed to raise prices...

NATO membership used to be motivated by a shared fear, however exploited, of a so-called “Soviet/communist threat” which made joining the military bloc a seemingly “natural” decision for the countries that did so during the Old Cold War. The US certainly pressured many of them behind the scenes, however, and it also exploited their membership for clandestine purposes such as embedding Gladio squads into their societies. The Soviet dissolution of 1991 removed the very reason for NATO’s...

Shakespeare once wrote that the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. Nowadays, we see the terms ‘humanitarian’ and ‘democracy’ abused to justify death and destruction. Traditionally honorable words such as "humanitarian" and "democracy" have come to acquire a darker and more cynical meaning following their misappropriation to justify the invasion of sovereign nations and to promote the spread of Western military and cultural dominance across the globe. The mainstream media, alongside some...

The vast regime of torture created by the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks continues to haunt America. The political class and most of the media have never dealt honestly with the profound constitutional corruption that such practices inflicted. Instead, torture enablers are permitted to pirouette as heroic figures on the flimsiest evidence. Former FBI chief James Comey is the latest beneficiary of the media’s “no fault” scoring on the torture scandal. In his media interviews for his...

Speaking at the UN General Assembly on Sept. 29, Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem demanded that US, French and Turkish forces leave his country immediately or be dealt with “accordingly”. Indeed, with the Islamic State reduced to insignificance, they have no justification for being there. The message is primarily addressed to Washington. Trained and equipped by the United States, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) control roughly 25-30 percent of Syria, including areas which hold the...

The next time you drive past one of those road signs with a digital readout showing how fast you’re going, don’t simply assume it’s there to remind you not to speed. It may actually be capturing your license plate data.According to recently released US federal contracting data, the Drug Enforcement Administration will be expanding the footprint of its nationwide surveillance network with the purchase of “multiple” trailer-mounted speed displays “to be retrofitted as mobile LPR [License Plate...

After last week’s explosive congressional hearing, the Senate and the Trump administration agreed to reopen the FBI background check into Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Former FBI chief James Comey wrote Sunday that “the FBI is up for this” because it is “full” of "people who just want to figure out what’s true." But truth has often been a scarce commodity in FBI investigations. Consider these cases stretching back decades: - The chief of the FBI’s violent crimes section was sent to...

It’s a given that Big Brother is always watching us. Unfortunately, thanks to the government’s ongoing efforts to build massive databases using emerging surveillance, DNA and biometrics technologies, Big Brother (and his corporate partners in crime) is getting even creepier and more invasive, intrusive and stalker-like. Indeed, every dystopian sci-fi film (and horror film, for that matter) we’ve ever seen is suddenly converging into this present moment in a dangerous trifecta between science...

Earlier today the US ambassador to NATO threatened to "take out" a new kind of Russian missile: The US envoy to NATO on Tuesday said that Russia must halt development of new missiles that could carry nuclear warheads and warned that the United States could 'take out' the system if it becomes operational. The US and Russia have for some time disagreed about the INF treaty. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed in 1987 between the Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev and US...

The nuclear war doomsday clock maintained on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists website has advanced to two minutes before midnight, the closest point to possible atomic apocalypse since the end of the Cold War. In 1995 the clock was at fourteen minutes to midnight, but the opportunity to set it back even further was lost as the United States and its European allies took advantage of a weakened Russia to advance NATO into Eastern Europe, setting the stage for a new cold war, which is now...

This week we witnessed the horrible spectacle of Nikki Haley, President Trump’s Ambassador to the United Nations, joining a protest outside the UN building and calling for the people of Venezuela to overthrow their government.“We are going to fight for Venezuela,” she shouted through a megaphone, “we are going to continue doing it until Maduro is gone.”This is the neocon mindset: that somehow the US has the authority to tell the rest of the world how to live and who may hold political power...