On November 21, 2024, Senior Judge Marsha J. Pechman of the US District Court for the Western District of Washington issued what seems likely to be her final order in Kinnucan v. National Security Agency et al. The order came more than four years after the federal...
During the course of an FBI written response to a Freedom of Information Act request asking about the trade names and suppliers of surveillance software the FBI had purchased, the government has yet again quietly acknowledged its antipathy to constitutional provisions...
About 17 years ago the insufferable former general, Wesley Clark, reported on a talk he once had in the Pentagon: “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia,...
In 2016, Donald Trump ran for president as a kinda-sorta, maybe-a-little-bit, “antiwar” candidate. Once in office, however, he escalated every war he had inherited, ending none of them, “surging” US troops into Syria and Afghanistan, making a public head-fake at...
The long-harboured aspirations of the US, Turkey and Israel to topple the Syrian government, mainly through their rebranded al-Qaeda allies, succeeded at lightning speed. Damascus fell days after Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) forces under Abu Mohammad al-Jolani...
In a reversal of the old proverb “Better the devil you know,” the U.S. and its partners in the Political West have embraced the devil they don’t. In Syria, they have traded Iran for al-Qaeda. When Bashar al-Assad fell, many of his international partners suffered...
The ongoing war and genocide in Gaza is unprecedented. Nothing that Israel and its supporters can say or do will avoid the historical accountability of the extermination of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. The above assertion is critical, both for ending the...
The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s rule is an opportunity for the US to overhaul its bankrupt Syria policy. The US should have abandoned this policy years earlier, but now there are no longer any pretexts for continuing the collective punishment of the Syrian people...
After an inconceivably fast twelve day march through Syria by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is in exile in Moscow, his government has fallen, the more than five decade’s long Ba’ath rule of Syria is over and a group descended from...
The final weeks of the Biden administration have been filled with turbulence in foreign policy. Some of the most serious wounds have been self-inflicted. For example, no one forced America’s lame-duck president to capitulate to Ukraine’s longstanding lobbying effort...
