President-elect Donald Trump will face pervasive doubts about his legitimacy from the day he takes office. His opponents will likely portray him as governing in unprecedented and reckless ways. The best response to such charges is to open the books and expose how the Obama administration commandeered far more power than most Americans realized.Trump should follow the excellent precedent set by President Obama. In 2009, shortly after he took office, Obama released many of the secret Bush...

Last week, as the mainstream media continued to obsess over the CIA’s evidence-free claim that the Russians hacked the presidential election, President Obama quietly sent 300 US Marines back into Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. This is the first time in three years that the US military has been sent into that conflict zone, and it represents a final failure of Obama’s Afghanistan policy. The outgoing president promised that by the end of his second term, the US military would only be present...

North Korea has "entered the final stage of preparation for the test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile(ICBM)." So crowed North Korea’s young leader, Kim Jong-un, in his New Year’s Day message aimed at tough-talking US president-elect, Donald Trump.In case there was any doubt about Pyongyang’s meaning, Kim warned his nation would continue to build its ‘capability for preemptive strike’ as long as the US and its allies continued their nuclear threats and "war games they stage on...

Cartoon of RT editor Margarita Simonyan from today's Intelligence Community AssessmentThe much-anticipated Intelligence Community report backing up its claims that the Russians hacked the US elections in November has just been released. Titled "Declassified Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections," the report is long on speculation and short on any evidence for the claims it was supposed to prove. It even came with a warning label stating...

James Clapper, the US Director of National Intelligence, on the basis of his comments to the Senate committee on Thursday about RT, would appear to agree with Alex Jones in thinking ‘there’s a war on for your mind’. I happen to disagree. I think there’s a race to the bottom, in order to see how much the American deep state and Congressional supporters of Obama’s neo-liberal ideology can condescend to ordinary Americans.The truth behind the ‘media wars’ is far less exotic, let alone dramatic...

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified at a hearing on “Russian interference” in the election that there’s a difference between “skepticism” of the intelligence community’s assessment and “disparagement” of said community. While stopping short of asking for a “safe space,” this admitted liar used the opportunity to cry on the shoulders of Donald Trump’s assembled enemies: “We’re not perfect,” he burbled, but hey everybody makes mistakes.Clapper’s remarks were clearly aimed...

Jon Rappoport’s mocking of the US presstitutes is superb: Vladimir Putin is the secret president of the United States.Yep. That’s it. The US is now the USSR. It’s all over. Trump is a Communist who took orders from Putin. Trump is a Red. That was his game all along. He’s a billionaire Commie. Ridicule is effective, and nothing deserves ridicule more than the Washington Post, New York, Times, CNN, and the rest of the presstitutes who pretend to be real journalists. But as I have emphasized, and...

Ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, one of the things that has fascinated me most is the response of the mainstream media. Supporting the retaliatory invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, ever-increasing budgets for the national-security establishment, and constantly expanding infringements on civil liberties and privacy, mainstream reporters, commentators, and pundits have steadfastly resisted focusing on the root cause of anti-American terrorism: deadly foreign interventionism on the part of...

I am reluctant to write about the “Israel problem” at the heart of US foreign policy two weeks in a row but it seems that the story just will not go away as the usual suspects pile on the Barack Obama Administration over its alleged betrayal of America’s “best and greatest friend and ally in the whole world.” Even as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his gaggle of war criminals continue to foam at the mouth over the United Nations vote it is, in truth, difficult to blame Israel for...

As the US mainstream media obsessed last week about Russia's supposed “hacking” of the US elections and President Obama’s final round of Russia sanctions in response, something very important was taking place under the media radar. As a result of a meeting between foreign ministers of Russia, Iran, and Turkey last month, a ceasefire in Syria has been worked out and is being implemented. So far it appears to be holding, and after nearly six years of horrible warfare the people of Syria are...

The Washington Post on Friday reported a genuinely alarming event: Russian hackers have penetrated the US power system through an electrical grid in Vermont. The Post headline conveyed the seriousness of the threat: Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to U.S. electrical grid security, officials say The first sentence of the article directly linked this cyber-attack to alleged Russian hacking of the email accounts of the DNC and John Podesta – what is now routinely referred...

One of my favorite literary expressions is the term "Parthian shaft." It refers to the favored tactic of the Parthians, a Persian people, of turning while on horseback and firing arrows while retreating.The Roman consul Crassus, who defeated Spartacus, may have died from such a Parthian shaft after his defeat at the battle of Carrhae in 53 BC.This week, outgoing President Barack Obama loosed his own Parthian shaft at Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, by refusing, for once, to veto a UN...

History loves little markers, tidy packages of symbolism that wrap up a big, complex thing.You know, the helicopter on the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon standing in for years of failed war, the Berlin Wall being knocked down to visually note the end the Cold War, that sort of thing.Well, the never-ending-gobsmacker of the Afghan War may have gotten its iconic moment.Crash and BurnAfghanistan’s first female pilot, Captain Niloofar Rahmani, above, has applied for asylum in the US,...

As noted previously, at some point today the White House is set to unveil new sanction, and other retaliatory "measures" against Russia and specifically the Kremlin, in retaliation for what according to a constantly repetitive narrative has been Russian hacking of the US election. Obama will do so by using a 2015 executive order that would allow the president to freeze the US assets of Russians overseas who have engaged in cyber acts, even though such order only applies to actions that have...

Ron Paul delivers keynote at his 'Peace and Prosperity 2016' conference this yearThe full wrath of the Beltway neocons is about to hit my Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Congress snuck language into this year's Defense Authorization Bill that enables President Obama (or a future president) to crack down on critics of Washington's disastrous foreign policy. All they have to do is claim an organization pushes "foreign propaganda" and a new task force including the State Department, Pentagon,...