Many people have an instinctive feeling that the mainstream media do not tell them the whole story.But few people realise quite to what extent the media are manipulated to send out a particular political message. This problem is especially acute with foreign stories because by definition readers know less about far away countries than about their own. They are therefore much more susceptible to a story being "spun" in one direction or another, especially if moral condemnation is involved:...

Being a warmongering neocon, and in particular being a warmongering neocon called Tony Blair, means never having to accept responsibility for the consequences of your actions. What it does mean is shifting the blame on to others and trying to rewrite history. You might have thought that someone who launched an illegal, disastrous war against a sovereign state that has led to the deaths of up to 1 million people and who made claims before the war which proved to be false, might show at the very...

Introduction by Franklin C. SpinneyAttached beneath my introductory comment is an essay by the American historian William R. Polk. His subject is the American predilection for non-learning in foreign policy. My comment is intended to set the stage by summarizing the dangerous shambles that now passes for foreign policy in the United States. Introductory Comment In a nutshell, recent events in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and Ukraine show there is no grand-strategic focus to America’s...

The late Saddam Hussein was certainly right when he predicted that America’s invasion of Iraq would become “the Mother of All Battles.” Eleven years later, it continues. This week saw the collapse of two divisions of Iraq’s government army, a full 30,000 men running like chickens before the relentless advance of the fighters of ISIS – the Islamic State of Iraq and Shams(Syria). The same puppet army trained and equipped for a decade by the US at a cost of $14 billion. An evil portent of what...

The debate over America’s Middle East policy has reached a new level of surreality. In the wake of President Obama’s West Point commencement address last month — in which he pledged to “ramp up” U.S. support for Syrian rebels seeking to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad — Washington elites are exhorting the Obama administration to do much more. Former U.S. ambassador to Syria Robert Ford urges intensified training and more advanced weapons for “moderate” opposition fighters; others argue for...

The United States is mulling further intervention in Iraq as the government forces flee Al Qaeda-linked insurgents and the country appears teetering on chaos. While the Administration is not ready to commit boots not the grounds, we may be moving toward a further influx of hundreds of millions or billions in military aid and even air strikes. As ISIS insurgents are seizing U.S. weaponry, the U.S. has already started to flood the country a new massive shipment of new free weapons. Islamic State...

A news article this week entitled “South Laredo Trafficking Group Indicted” caught my attention. That’s because Laredo is my hometown. I spent 26 years there, including 8 years practicing law, most of which was in partnership with my father. That newspaper article is about the drug war. It reports that an indictment was returned against 24 Laredoans for violations of federal drug laws. The indictment charges the defendants with distribution of cocaine, crack, and marijuana in the Laredo area....