The RPI Challenge

I can’t decide which is more amusing: the CIA’s use of “national security” to justify keeping secret its 50-year-old records in the JFK assassination or the mainstream media’s response to the continued secrecy.On the one hand, the CIA’s use of “national security” to justify keeping 98 percent of the still-secret records is palpably laughable. However one defines that nebulous term “national security,” one thing is patently clear: Nothing — absolutely nothing — would have happened to the United...

The US government has spent a staggering $1.46 trillion on wars abroad since September 11, 2001, according to the Department of Defense’s (DoD) periodical “Cost of War” report. As International Business Times reports, this amounts to $250 million a day for 16 years consecutively.The newly released version, published by the Federation of American Scientists’ Secrecy News blog, spans war-related activity from the September 11th terrorist attacks through mid-2017.According to the report, despite...

One of the "Russia-linked" ads that threw the election to Trump...Now we can see why they initially tried to keep a lid on the content of the infamous "Russia-linked" social media advertisements. Today, while grilling representatives of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a number of social media ads they claim were taken out by "Russia-linked" accounts for the purpose of interfering in the US electoral process. The ads were supposed to have swayed...

This is how the Deep State crushes disobedience by the unwashed American public. It indicts not only ham sandwiches but, apparently, political infants in diapers too, if that's what it takes. Hence the sudden notoriety of Baby George Papadopoulos, who pled guilty to "lying" about an essentially immaterial date to the FBI.Oh, and by all signs and signals that plea came after this 30 year-old novice had been wearing a wire for several months.So here's how this noxious act of bullying by Robert...

Wars that the United States is waging around the world undermine our security by turning entire populations against us and diverting our attention and resources away from urgent needs at home. No, the opposite is true: the United States faces serious threats, and can only protect itself by confronting them wherever they emerge. This debate has divided Americans for more than a century. Congress may soon have a rare opportunity to take one side or the other.The battleground is Yemen, the...

Does anyone in the Trump Administration have a clue about our Syria policy? In March, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson appeared to be finally pulling back from President Obama’s disastrous “Assad must go” position that has done nothing but prolong the misery in Syria. At the time, Tillerson said, the "longer-term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people." Those of us who believe in national sovereignty would say that is pointing out the obvious. Nevertheless it was a good...

If you want to change a group of terrorists who have killed American overseas into something that appears to be much more benign, all you have to do is pay off the right people in Washington. With enough money, you can even open a nice plush lobbying office on Pennsylvania Avenue in the District of Columbia, not too far from the White House and Capitol Hill.One-time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been rightly blamed for the ill-conceived and badly bungled “regime change” in Libya in...

A television interview of a top Qatari official confessing the truth behind the origins of the war in Syria is going viral across Arabic social media during the same week a leaked top secret NSA document was published which confirms that the armed opposition in Syria was under the direct command of foreign governments from the early years of the conflict.And according to a well-known Syria analyst and economic adviser with close contacts in the Syrian government, the explosive interview...

Donald Trump’s presidency, like preceding ones, is trapped by the interests of the power elite that has ruled America since World War II. The constraints imposed on domestic policy by this elite inevitably have a direct impact on America’s foreign policy. Alternative social forces, like the ones behind Trump’s presidential triumph, only have a limited impact on domestic and ultimately on foreign policy. A conceptual detour and a brief on history and on Trump’s domestic setting when he was...

In the past, America has witnessed “McCarthyism” from the Right and even complaints from the Right about “McCarthyism of the Left.” But what we are witnessing now amid the Russia-gate frenzy is what might be called “Establishment McCarthyism," traditional media/political powers demonizing and silencing dissent that questions mainstream narratives.This extraordinary assault on civil liberties is cloaked in fright-filled stories about “Russian propaganda” and wildly exaggerated tales of the...

Twitter has announced today that it will no longer be accepting advertisements from Russian outlets RT and Sputnik, thereby protecting Americans from consuming advertisements by propaganda outlets other than CNN, Fox, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, the Daily Beast, The Hill, NPR, the LA Times,USA Today, Newsweek, AP, Reuters, the Guardian, and any corporate media outlet used to manufacture public support for a corporatist system of...

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, picture right, meets with Saudi Arabia’s Arab Gulf Affairs Minister Thamer al-Sabhan in Beirut, Lebanon on February 6 2017. The fight to free the Syrian city of Raqqa from Daesh (ISIS) — by the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), led by U.S. special forces — has all but ended. With Raqqa now under SDF control, the question has become how to rebuild the former Daesh stronghold. The reconstruction of Raqqa will undoubtedly last longer than the...

An historic opportunity is being missed. The disastrous 2016 presidential election could and should have been a wakeup call. A corrupt political system that gave voters a choice between two terrible candidates is not democracy. This should have been the signal to face reality. The US political system is totally rotten, contemptuous of the people, serving the corporations and lobbies that pay to keep them in office. The time had come to organize a genuine alternative, an independent movement to...