During my recent visit to my hometown of Laredo, Texas, as I was heading out of town toward Corpus Christi, I passed by the former site of Laredo Air Force Base. Serving as a training base for new pilots, the base was a prominent part of Laredo life when I was growing up.During that time, public officials and much of the citizenry were scared to death that the base might close. Like many people on the dole and like many other American communities with military bases, Laredoans were convinced...

Any police officer who shoots to kill is playing with fire. In that split second of deciding whether to shoot and where to aim, that officer has appointed himself judge, jury and executioner over a fellow citizen. And when an officer fires a killing shot at a fellow citizen not once or twice but three and four and five times, he is no longer a guardian of the people but is acting as a paid assassin. In so doing, he has short-circuited a legal system that was long ago established to protect...

The use of chemical weapons in Syria has absolutely no influence on the military situation on the ground. But it’s a good example of how propaganda wars are waged. Some Western media outlets seem to dance to the tune of terrorist groups. Here is the confirmation of this fact. Reuters reported on August 2 that a helicopter dropped containers of toxic gas overnight on a town close to where a Russian military rotary wing aircraft had been shot down hours earlier. According to the agency’s report,...

Former director of the Central Intelligence Agency Michael J. Morell is the latest in a phalanx of senior US military-intelligence figures who are shedding any pretense of political neutrality and giving their full-throated endorsement to Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In a New York Times opinion piece, Morell starkly backed Clinton as the most ”highly qualified to be commander-in-chief… keeping our nation safe.” The ex-CIA chief’s op-ed piece also served as a blunt hatchet...

Last Friday saw the release of a bombshell jobs report, with headlines exclaiming that the US economy added over 250,000 jobs in July, far in excess of any forecasts. The reality was far more grim. Those “jobs” weren't actually created by businesses – they were created by the statisticians who compiled the numbers, through the process of “seasonal adjustment.” That's a bit of statistical magic that the government likes to pull out of its hat when the real data isn't very flattering. It's done...

On his visit to Hiroshima last May, Obama did not, as some had vainly hoped he might, apologize for the August 6, 1945 atomic bombing of the city. Instead he gave a high-sounding speech against war. He did this as he was waging ongoing drone war against defenseless enemies in faraway countries and approving plans to spend a trillion dollars upgrading the US nuclear arsenal. An apology would have been as useless as his speech. Empty words don’t change anything. But here was one thing that Obama...

It’s been the week from hell for Donald Trump. Everything seems to be going wrong for him. The worst was the foolish and painful fight he picked with the grieving Khan family.What happened was clearly a very clever ambush devised by the Clinton camp. A Muslim-American attorney, Khizr Khan, whose army officer son had been blown up in Iraq, was put on show at the Democratic Convention to attack Donald Trump’s ignorant and stupid anti-Muslim policies – and to embarrass him.It worked brilliantly....

The Nusra Front’s adoption of the new name Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and claim that it has separated itself from al-Qaeda was designed to influence US policy, not to make the group any more independent of al-Qaeda. The objective of the manoeuvre was to head off US-Russian military cooperation against the jihadist group, renamed last week, based at least in part on the hope that the US bureaucratic and political elite, who are lining up against a new US-Russian agreement, may block or reverse the...

Early May US Secretary of State Kerry set a deadline for "voluntary" regime change in Syria: [He] said 'the target date for the transition is 1st of August' in Syria or else the Assad government and its allies 'are asking for a very different track.' Hoping that 'something happens in these next few months,' he said the political transition would not include President Assad because 'as long as Assad is there, the opposition is not going to stop fighting.' Kerry made those remarks after meeting...

piece:The ICTY’s exoneration of the late Slobodan Milosevic, the former President of Yugoslavia, for war crimes committed in the Bosnia war, proves again we should take NATO claims regarding its “official enemies” not with a pinch of salt, but a huge lorry load. For the past twenty odd years, neocon commentators and “liberal interventionist” pundits have been telling us at every possible opportunity, that Milosevic (a democratically elected leader in a country where over 20 political parties...

Amidst the fury over the exchanges between Donald Trump and Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the couple who lost their son in Iraq, the mainstream media and mainstream political commentators are missing some important elements in the controversy. In his speech at the Democratic national convention, Khizr Khan asked if Donald Trump had read the Constitution. That question raises a related question, one that arises within the context of the US government’s war on Iraq: What difference does it make...

For all the chatter about animosity between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Washington Post reports that “a senior Israeli official will arrive in Washington next week for a final round of negotiations involving the largest military aid package the United States has ever given any country and that will last more than a decade after President Obama leaves office.” The US already transfers $3.1 billion in taxpayer money every year to Israel — more...

Despite Hillary Clinton obtaining the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination last week, many people, including many Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) delegates who publicly dissented throughout the Democratic National Convention and even walked off the convention floor in protest, dispute the claim that Clinton is a progressive. Reasons people offer for opposing the applicability of the progressive label to Clinton are many — from Clinton’s support for international managed trade deals to her...

It is a sad commentary on the state of political life in the United States that our political conventions have become more like rock music festivals than competitions of ideas. There has been a great deal of bombast, of insults, of name-calling, and of chest-beating at both party conventions, but what is disturbingly absent is any mention of how we got to this crisis and how we can get out. From the current foreign policy mess to the looming economic collapse, all we hear is both party...

Anti-Russian hysteria in America reached its apogee this week as Democrats tried to divert attention from embarrassing revelations about how the Democratic Party apparatus had rigged the primaries against Bernie Sanders by claiming Vlad Putin and his KGB had hacked and exposed the Dems' emails. This was rich coming from the US that snoops into everyone’s emails and phones across the globe. Remember German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone being bugged by the US National Security Agency?...