The Associated Press has carried an exclusive report regarding the intensive, on-going political dialogue between the Afghan government and the Taliban behind the scene, the appearance of a "stalemate" notwithstanding. That such contacts have been going on was a widely known secret, but the AP report is specific regarding their high frequency and it discloses that these contacts are handled at a very high level. There is no reason to doubt the AP claim citing authoritative sources.Thus, there...

Louise Mensch and Chris Hayes on Real Time On Monday, The Guardian published a story which should have surprised no one: Information pushed aggressively on Twitter by anti-Trump conspiracy theorist duo Louise Mensch and Claude Taylor came from a hoaxer who duped Taylor in an email.Taylor, a former White House staffer under Bill Clinton, tweeted out “fake details of criminal inquiries” related to Donald Trump which did not exist and were “invented” by a hoaxer claiming to work for the New York...

In the wake of the protest in Charlottesville by white supremacists, many people are demanding a crackdown on dangerous right-wing extremists. The federal government has previously carried out similar campaigns against with disastrous results. Rather than intellectually purifying the nation, such efforts are far more likely to turn nitwits into martyrs and to ravage Washington’s credibility.Prior federal law enforcement efforts to take down “bad ideas” quickly spiraled out of control. In the...

When politicians are feeling the heat, they start a war and their popularity goes up even if the war is unnecessary or completely ridiculous. Donald Trump, the presidential candidate who promised that he would not take the nation into another Middle Eastern war, did so when he launched a fifty-nine cruise missile barrage against a Syrian Air Base even before he knew for sure what had happened on the ground. It was totally stupid but proved to be popular, even among talking heads and...

The Senate Intelligence Committee recently passed its Intelligence Authorization Act for 2018 that contains a chilling attack on the First Amendment. Section 623 of the act expresses the “sense of Congress” that WikiLeaks resembles a “non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors and should be treated as such.” This language is designed to delegitimize WikiLeaks, encourage the federal government to spy on individuals working with WikiLeaks, and block access to WikiLeaks’...

The Ron Paul Institute's second annual Washington, D.C. conference got a shot in the arm over the weekend, as Wikileaks founder and chief editor Julian Assange agreed to open up the Whistleblowers Roundtable with a talk on the recent US Senate and Director of Central Intelligence attacks on Wikileaks as a "non-state hostile intelligence agency." Assange's appearance at the conference could not be more timely, as it looks like US intelligence is about to take more "active measures" against...

Two police officers in Kissimmee, Florida, were recently shot and killed while investigating illegal drug activity in a dangerous part of town. According to the New York Times, government officials praised the officers for their service and asked Floridians to pray for other law-enforcement personnel. President Trump weighed in with a tweet in which he offered his thoughts and prayers for the Kissimmee police and their families.There is one big thing about that picture, however: It is the drug...

Since the German Marshall Fund of the United States unveiled its “Alliance For Securing Democracy (AFSD)," I’ve resisted commenting, simply because the lobby group’s “Hamilton 68 dashboard” is too preposterous to merit serious analysis.It has rightly been ridiculed by journalists and activists who never tire of knocking the Kremlin.The portal purports to use “600 Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence efforts online” to prove how Moscow is trying to sow seeds of doubt in the Western...

President Trump’s ability to trigger a nuclear war is "pretty damn scary" said former US intelligence director James Clapper this week. Remember when Trump vowed to "bomb the shit" out of his enemies?I don’t have much respect for Clapper, who brazenly lied to Congress and is a ringleader of the deep government’s efforts to overthrow Trump. But this time, Clapper is 100 percent right. He’s scared and I am too.This week, Trump proclaimed he would continue the pointless, stalemated US colonial...

For some time it has been clear that the White House of President Donald Trump was convulsed with a struggle among various court factions vying for the Emperor’s ear. Crudely oversimplified, these are variously described as:1. The military "Junta" (Generals McMaster, National Security Council; Mattis, Pentagon; and Kelly, White House Chief of Staff;2. The Goldman-Sachs "Globalists" (preeminently First Daughter Ivanka and First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner);3. The "Populist-Nationalists" ("the two...

NOTE: I’ll be speaking at the Ron Paul Institute’s Peace and Prosperity 2017 Conference. Saturday, September 9, from 9:30 am to 3:00 p.m., Washington Dulles Airport Marriott. Last year’s conference was a sell-out and this year’s conference promises to be even better. Only $75. I hope you’ll join us for a timely and very important conference. Register here.Like President Trump, President Kennedy was subjected to the same type of pressure by the Pentagon and the CIA to engage in military action...

The liberal media is pushing the idea that any violence committed on the part of Antifa, the so-called "anti-fascist" leftist group, is acceptable if it is directed at the political right. Such delusional thinking will only lead to civil war.Following the recent spate of violence that rocked Charlottesville after right-wing groups assembled to protest the removal of a Confederate statue, it became quickly apparent the US media had a dog in this fight. And a vicious dog at that.Liberals howled...

According to reports, Gen. H. R. McMaster convinced President Trump to give up his longstanding opposition to the Afghan war by showing him this photograph, below, of Afghan women in what the media are describing as “miniskirts.” As the Washington Post put it: One of the ways McMaster tried to persuade Trump to recommit to the effort was by convincing him that Afghanistan was not a hopeless place. He presented Trump with a black-and-white snapshot from 1972 of Afghan women in miniskirts...

If there was a prize for the world’s most ineffective institution, the International Criminal Court would win hands down.Consider this: The court has been in operation for fifteen years, has spent over a billion Euros, and has convicted just four war criminals. Yes, that's correct. In a decade and a half, an institution proclaiming itself the world’s first permanent war crimes court has jailed just four war criminals.In any other justice system that kind of abysmal conviction rate would get...