For years now I have been pointing out that Obama’s lasting legacy would be his ill-advised decision back in 2009 to normalize assassination, which his administration successfully rebranded as “targeted killing”. This was supposed to be the latest and greatest form of “smart war”: the use of unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), or lethal drones, …
Continue reading “US Drone Killing Machine Now on Autopilot”
Iraq executed 31 militants convicted of participating in the 2014 Camp Speicher massacre.
Oops. Did President Barack Obama acknowledge that the extraordinary propaganda campaign to blame Russia for helping Donald Trump become president has a very big hole in it, i.e., that the US intelligence community has no idea how the Democratic emails reached WikiLeaks? For weeks, eloquent obfuscation – expressed with “high confidence” – has been the …
Continue reading “Obama Admits Gap in Russian ‘Hack’ Case”
Donald Trump has a problem – he’s virtually alone. It isn’t just that he strays significantly from his own party’s orthodoxy on major foreign policy questions. His conundrum is that even his own cabinet choices very often depart from the Trumpist canon, a fact that may undermine his ability to actually implement his foreign policy …
Continue reading “Trump Against the World”
Originally posted at TomDispatch. They call themselves the U.S. "Intelligence Community," or the IC. If you include the office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which in 2005 began as a crew of 12 people, including its director, and by 2008 had already grown to a staff of 1,750, there are 17 members (adding …
Continue reading “A Living Nightmare of Intelligence Groupthink”
The Trump administration may recognize that the Syrian army is the only institution committed to resisting terrorism in its country Gareth Porter A new coalition of US-based organizations is pushing for a more aggressive US intervention against the Assad regime. But both the war in Syria and politics in the United States have shifted dramatically …
Continue reading “US Intervention Against Syria? Not Under Trump”
An Iraqi colonel was among the people killed in Iraq on Sunday.
A new mass grave containing dozens of cadets believed killed in the 2014 Camp Speicher massacre were discovered near Tikrit.
Militants executed a number of men in Kirkuk.
The commutation of Chelsea Manning’s sentence by President Barack Obama is bad politics – and, from my vantage point, the only moral act on his part that I can recall. It took balls to do this, and for that I have to give him credit. One has to also note that the timing here is …
Continue reading “Chelsea Manning, A Heroine for Our Times” 
