After some delays, the United States is dispatching a second aircraft-carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, from the Caribbean to the Middle East to join the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group and threaten Iran. This is the third Atlantic crossing for the Ford’s crew...
A Mockery of Justice: Torture Victim to Face Trial at Guantánamo After 25 Years
Reprinted from Andy Worthington’s website. In the long, dark farce of Guantánamo’s military commissions, the recently announced and almost entirely ignored decision by the Pentagon to turn down a plea deal for Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, a prominent CIA torture victim...
Peeling Back the US Information Operation in Iran
As part of the US campaign to engineer a regime change in Iran, the US military and intelligence community are using Operational Preparation of the Environmnet aka OPE. OPE is defined in joint publications (e.g., JP 3-05 Special Operations) as non-intelligence...
Venezuela’s Oil and the Death of a Latin American Dream
On January 29, Venezuela’s acting President, Delcy Rodríguez, signed a law that opens Venezuela’s oil industry to privatization. With the stroke of a pen, Rodríguez signed, not only the law, but the death certificate of a decades old Latin American dream. In 2007,...
Senator Tom Cotton’s Ode to US Nuclear Weapons
Hawkish Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) has never been a big fan of arms control agreements. His new op-ed in the Wall Street Journal confirms that his attitude has not softened in the slightest. The opening paragraph adopts a highly militant tone. “The New Strategic Arms...
The Meaning of the ‘Rules-Based’ Order and 75 Years of NATO
The Munich Security Conference is underway, and both American and European politicians have taken the opportunity to lament the end of the old “rules-based” order. The problem is that the order to which they refer never truly existed. With a quarter century of the new...
Laura Dogu and Washington’s Regime-Change Playbook: Nicaragua, Honduras, Venezuela
Laura Dogu, newly appointed US envoy to Venezuela, is described by the Los Angeles Times as an appropriate choice because she “navigated crises” in Nicaragua and Honduras during periods of “social and political volatility.” What the LA Times fails to add is that it...
First Gaza, Then the World: The Global Danger of Israeli Exceptionalism
While many nations occasionally resort to a "state of exception" to deal with temporary crises, Israel exists in a permanent state of exception. This Israeli exceptionalism is the very essence of the instability that plagues the Middle East. The concept of the state...
When Did Starvation Become an Acceptable Tool of Foreign Policy?
On September 15, 1970, Richard Nixon infamously instructed the CIA to “make the economy [of Chile] scream” (CIA Director Richard Helms actual note of the conversation can be seen here). But “the economy” is an abstraction; the reality of economic warfare is a starving...
1953 Redux – Neocons Want To Saddle Iran With the Son of the Persian Stalin
It’s getting a little old at this point, but as the Deep State log rolls for another U.S. attack on Iran, it is promoting a new Iranian national savior, one with a familiar name. Here’s a graphic seen on X, much like others showing up on social media, championing Reza...


