Redeem American Ideals: US Government Must End the Political Prosecution of Julian Assange
On July 3, 2020, Julian Assange will turn 50 years old, spending his third birthday behind bars. The WikiLeaks publisher has been held without any formal charges alongside criminals and terrorists inside London's high-security prison for exposing the US government’s...
Manufactured Mission: The Iraq & Syria Forever War-Factories
It is by now a near cliché in defense-watcher circles to talk about the common peril of "mission creep" in military interventions. Naturally, that’s not translated to America avoiding this tendency – of gradually shifting objectives during the course...
The US Military Presence in the Middle East Needs To End
The U.S. has no compelling reason to keep tens of thousands of troops in the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Syria, and it should follow the withdrawal from Afghanistan with complete withdrawals of the forces currently located in these countries. There is a growing body of...
Countering the ‘China Threat’ – at What Price?
In early June 2021, in a classified directive to Pentagon officials, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin slammed the former Trump administration for talking big but never taking action to counter “the China threat.” Austin made it clear that things would be...
The Sanctimonious Destruction of Syria: Washington Starves Syrians To Save Them
In recent years, the U.S. government has turned starvation into official policy. Determined to force hostile states to bend to its will, Washington increasingly imposes economic sanctions, using America’s financial dominance to penalize foreign individuals, companies,...
Iraq Daily Roundup: Three Killed
Boris Johnson Defies Vladimir Putin’s Claim to Crimea
About that clash between a British destroyer and Russian warplanes and warships in the Black Sea last week there are conflicting versions. The Kremlin version is the more dramatic. HMS Defender, says Moscow, entered the Black Sea, made port in Odessa, Ukraine, and...
HMS Defender Versus the Russian Military: The Danger of Believing Your Own Propaganda
Less than two weeks after NATO members reaffirmed allegiance to Article 5 – that an attack on one member was an attack on all members – the UK nearly put that pledge to the test. In a shockingly provocative move, the UK’s HMS Defender purposely...
Warmongering British Actions in the Black Sea
The pre-positioning of the BBC correspondent on HMS Defender shatters the pretense that the BBC is something different to a state propaganda broadcaster. It also makes plain that this propaganda exercise to provoke the Russian military was calculated and deliberate....
