The death of Saudi King Abdullah adds a new layer of uncertainty to the already chaotic Middle East, including whether his successor will continue pursuing a détente with Israel and how the oil-rich kingdom will approach the dangerous issue of…
Category: Obama Administration
Congress Seeks Netanyahu’s Direction
Exclusive: Conservative Pat Buchanan once got in trouble by calling Capitol Hill “Israeli occupied territory,” but even he might not imagine what’s happening now with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu invited to address a joint session of Congress to decry President Obama’s foreign policy,…
CIA Wants Its Reputation Back
The CIA doesn’t like to be portrayed as the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, so it has been using the leak trial of ex-CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling to insist that it really can shoot straight and indeed is brilliantly protecting…
Obama’s Modest Proposals
President Obama struck a folksy tone during his State of the Union address, but there wasn’t much substance for the average folks and even his fairly modest proposals for helping the middle class face determined GOP opposition as Michael Winship…
The Anti-Empirical Empire
In many ways, America has become the anti-empirical empire, a superpower where many political leaders divorce themselves from facts. Few examples are more glaring or dangerous than the continued denial of global warming despite the latest evidence of impending catastrophe,…
The West’s Help to Islamic Jihadists
Though Western leaders now lock arms in disgust over Islamic fundamentalism, the West’s actions from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama have often promoted the interests of jihadists from Afghanistan in the 1980s to Iraq in the 2000s to Libya and…
The CIA’s Prosecutorial Defense
In the trial of alleged CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling, the U.S. government appears more intent on burnishing the CIA’s tarnished reputation than proving Sterling’s guilt. The defendant almost looks to be collateral damage in this PR process, as Norman Solomon…
How Propaganda Conquers Democracy
In recent decades, the U.S. propaganda system has grown more and more sophisticated in the art of “perception management,” now enlisting not only government PR specialists but careerist journalists and aspiring bloggers to push deceptions on the public, a crisis…
The Danger of an MH-17 ‘Cold Case’
Exclusive: The Obama administration continues to drag its feet on releasing U.S. intelligence evidence on who shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 six months ago, a failure that has given the guilty parties time to scatter and has created a…
Risky Blowback from Russian Sanctions
Today’s American foreign policy “elite” rarely thinks through the dangerous consequences of its “tough-guy” actions, including its new plan to provoke economic and political chaos in nuclear-armed Russia, a “strategy” that is also spreading pain and disorder to Europe, as…