Foreign Policy Category Archive

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Congress Votes to Arm Violent Mobs That Storm Through Capitols Around the World

Ted Rall • January 15, 2021

• 800 Words • 12 Comments • Reply

Terrified political leaders watched the police who were assigned to protect them melt away. They fled as an angry mob of hooligans, riled up by sketchy allegations of rigged elections, stormed up the stairs of the government building that hosted the debates and deliberations of their venerable democracy. The rioters, reactionary right-wingers from the nation's... Read More

Navalny Poison

Israel Shamir • September 1, 2020

• 1,900 Words • 228 Comments • Reply

We do not yet know what has happened to Alexei Navalny; he is still in a medically induced coma in a German hospital. If it is poisoning, (and this is far from being certain) it is not clear yet what poison and under what circumstances he consumed it. Yet even so we are just as... Read More

Half a Pulitzer Prize to the Wall Street Journal

Ron Unz • August 23, 2020

• 1,800 Words • 372 Comments • Reply

For forty years I carefully read the New York Times in hard copy each and every morning, eager to discover what had transpired since the previous day. But just in the last few months, my commitment has begun to flag, and my eyes often only lightly glance at half or more of the articles and... Read More

Putin and Russia Are Facing a Very Serious Crisis in Belarus

The Saker • August 10, 2020

• 3,100 Words • 259 Comments • Reply

Some of my longtime readers might have noticed that I rarely (if ever!) wrote about Belarus or President Lukashenko. As always with the blog, there is a reason for why I do mention something and no less a reason why I do not mention something. In the case of Belarus or Lukashenko, my reason for... Read More

If You Do It, It's Spying. If I Do It, It's Research.

Larry Romanoff • August 10, 2020

• 3,300 Words • 121 Comments • Reply

In the late 1950s and early 1960s there was an American TV series called "The Naked City", set in NYC. The opening for each episode began with the intoned words, "There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This is one of them." Well, there are probably 8 million American spy stories that have... Read More

israeli-prime-minister-netanyahu-speaks-during-a-bilateral-meeting-with-u-s-president-trump-during-the-73rd-session-of-the-united-nations-general-assembly-at-u-n-headquarters-in-new-york

War Crimes and War Criminals: Who Will be Held Accountable?

Philip Giraldi • July 23, 2020

• 1,300 Words • 232 Comments • Reply

There is something unique about how the United States manipulates the “terrorism” label to avoid being accused of carrying out war crimes. When an indigenous militia or an armed insurgency like the Taliban in a country like Iraq or Afghanistan attacks American soldiers subsequent to a U.S. invasion which overthrew the country’s government, it is... Read More

Retiring director of the CIA Allen Dulles (centre) with US President John F Kennedy and Dulles’ CIA replacement John A. McCone in Washington, DC. in early 1960s. Picture: AP

CIA Project MK-ULTRA

Larry Romanoff • July 2, 2020

• 22,100 Words • 130 Comments • Reply

The United States government funded and performed countless psychological experiments on unwitting humans, especially during the Cold War era, perhaps partially to help develop more effective torture and interrogation techniques for the US military and the CIA, but the almost unbelievable extent, range and duration of these activities far surpassed possible interrogation applications and appear... Read More

The Malign Russians and Chinese Are Coming

Pepe Escobar • July 2, 2020

• 1,000 Words • 21 Comments • Reply

No less than 78.03% of Russians have just voted in support of constitutional amendments. Among these, we find the paramount Atlanticist obsession: the possibility that Vladimir Putin will be able to run for two more presidential terms. Predictably, anguished cries of “Dictator! Dictator!” have been lobbied like deadly shells all across the Beltway. They might... Read More

Trump Against the Government: Officials Conflicted Over Lying for the President

Philip Giraldi • May 7, 2020

• 1,300 Words • 192 Comments • Reply

Once upon a time in the United States there was a consensus among national politicians that there were two areas where there should be a unified approach to policy. They were national security and foreign policy, both of which involved other nations, which made desirable a perception of unity on the part of the president... Read More

Another Expensive War, Another Intelligence Failure?

Philip Giraldi • April 2, 2020

• 1,300 Words • 37 Comments • Reply

The United States has been at war almost continuously since the founding of the nation in 1783. Some of the wars were undeclared like the centuries-long eradication of the native Americans, while others – the Mexican and Spanish-American wars – were glorified by including the names of the countries defeated by Washington’s war machine. America’s... Read More

Fake News Starts in Washington: Perception Management and Influence Operations Manipulate Public Opinion

Philip Giraldi • March 12, 2020

• 1,200 Words • 15 Comments • Reply

It is perhaps unusual to have a government that has as much disregard for what most would consider to be the truth as does the current group of rascals running the United States of America. To be sure, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is as shameless a liar as has ever been seen on any... Read More

Draining the Intelligence Community Swamp

New hires will all be Israel's poodles

Philip Giraldi • March 3, 2020

• 2,100 Words • 226 Comments • Reply

The appointment of U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell as interim Director of National Intelligence (DNI), a position that he will apparently hold simultaneously with the ambassadorship, has been criticized from all sides due to his inexperience, history of bad judgement and partisanship. The White House is now claiming that he will be replaced by... Read More

With Grenell Appointment, the Israel Lobby’s Foothold on US Intelligence Grows Even Stronger

Whitney Webb • February 25, 2020

• 2,300 Words • 18 Comments • Reply

With Richard Grenell now overseeing all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, Israel’s influence over the U.S. intelligence community has reached new and troubling heights. Last week’s appointment of U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell to the post of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) received criticism from both sides of the political divide, mainly for his lack... Read More

Musical Chairs in the White House

On the job training in the intelligence community

Philip Giraldi • February 25, 2020

• 2,000 Words • 186 Comments • Reply

Here in the Land of Oz, otherwise known as Washington, one continues to run into people who should know better who insist that they have a friend in the White House who confirms that President Donald Trump is really a man of peace being obstructed as he seeks to withdraw the United States from senseless... Read More

The Mysterious Michael D’Andrea: Was the C.I.A.’s Iran Mission Center Chief Shot Down?

Philip Giraldi • February 2, 2020

• 1,000 Words • 80 Comments • Reply

Last Monday a United States Air Force Bombardier E11A communications and intelligence gathering jet was either shot down or crashed in a remote mountainous region of Afghanistan. Almost immediately a story sourcing Taliban officials ran on Iranian State television claiming that the dead had included Michael D’Andrea, the chief of the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.)’s... Read More

Replant the American Dream. “Your USA Today Is the World’s Most Hated Nation”. Why?

Larry Romanoff • January 22, 2020

• 1,200 Words • 1 Comment • Reply

Some years ago, David Ignatius wrote an article in the Washington Post titled, ‘Replant the American Dream’ [1], in which he told of travelling the world as a foreign correspondent some 35 years ago, and how he believed that as an American he carried a kind of white flag, presumably of purity and moral superiority,... Read More

America's Long History of Meddling in Russia

Ted Rall • January 17, 2020

• 1,000 Words • 7 Comments • Reply

Russia — OK, not the actual Russian government but a private troll farm company located in Russia — bought $100,000 worth of political ads on Facebook designed to change the outcome of the 2016 election. Except that only a small fraction of those ads were political. Also except that the small fraction was divvied up... Read More

How an Israeli Spy-Linked Tech Firm Gained Access to the US Gov’t’s Most Classified Networks

Whitney Webb • January 14, 2020

• 3,900 Words • 35 Comments • Reply

Through its main investors, SoftBank and Lockheed Martin, Cybereason not only has ties to the Trump administration but has its software running on some of the U.S. government’s most classified and secretive networks. If the networks of the U.S. military, the U.S. intelligence community and a slew of other U.S. federal agencies were running the... Read More

Who Spied on Julian Assange?

There are many possible suspects

Philip Giraldi • December 10, 2019

• 1,700 Words • 108 Comments • Reply

The Julian Assange drama drags on. Though he continues to sit in a top security British prison awaiting developments in his expected extradition to the United States, the Spanish High Court has been given permission to interview him. Assange is claiming that the Spanish company contracted with by the Ecuadorean government to do embassy security... Read More

Rethinking National Security: CIA and FBI Are Corrupt, But What About Congress?

Philip Giraldi • November 21, 2019

• 1,400 Words • 26 Comments • Reply

The developing story about how the US intelligence and national security agencies may have conspired to influence and possibly even reverse the results of the 2016 presidential election is compelling, even if one is disinclined to believe that such a plot would be possible to execute. Not surprisingly perhaps there have been considerable introspection among... Read More

Bolivia Proves That Latin America Cannot Exit the American Empire

Paul Craig Roberts • November 15, 2019

• 600 Words

Jeanine Anez, one of the Bolivian Spanish elite, has declared herself the President of Bolivia. She is one of the elite allied with Washington who accused Evo Morales of rigging his reelection. But the CIA’s Bolivian lackeys who forced Morales to resign his presidency don’t bother with elections. They just declare themselves president like Juan... Read More

John Brennan's CIA Trump Task Force

Could it become Obamagate?

Philip Giraldi • November 12, 2019

• 1,900 Words • 266 Comments • Reply

There is considerable evidence that the American system of government may have been victimized by an illegal covert operation organized and executed by the U.S. intelligence and national security community. Former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director Jim Comey appear to have played critical leadership roles... Read More

The End of Accountable Government Is Close at Hand

Paul Craig Roberts • October 27, 2019

• 500 Words

For about 70 years the CIA has been undermining a free press. It began with Operation Mockingbird, a Cold War operation against communism. The CIA recruited journalists into a propaganda network. The CIA paid journalists to write fake stories or to publish stories written by the CIA in order to control explanations that served the... Read More

The Road to Damascus: How the Syria War Was Won

Following the Damascus-Kurdish alliance, Syria may become the biggest defeat for the Central Intelligence Agency since...

Pepe Escobar • October 18, 2019

• 2,600 Words • Leave a Comment

What is happening in Syria, following yet another Russia-brokered deal, is a massive geopolitical game-changer. I’ve tried to summarize it in a single paragraph this way: Syria may be the biggest defeat for the CIA since Vietnam. Yet that hardly begins to tell the whole story. Allow me to briefly sketch in broad historical strokes... Read More

From “Spook Air” to the “Lolita Express”: the Genesis and Evolution of the Jeffrey Epstein-Bill Clinton Relationship

Whitney Webb • August 23, 2019

• 11,300 Words • 92 Comments • Reply

Far from being the work of a single political party, intelligence agency or country, the power structure revealed by the network connected to Epstein is nothing less than a criminal enterprise that is willing to use and abuse children in the pursuit of ever more power, wealth and control. On August 10th, and for several... Read More

Hidden in Plain Sight: the Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case

Whitney Webb • July 18, 2019

• 6,600 Words • Leave a Comment

Epstein is only the latest incarnation of a much older, more extensive and sophisticated operation that offers a frightening window into how deeply tied the U.S. government is to the modern-day equivalents of organized crime. Despite his “sweetheart” deal and having seemingly evaded justice, billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was arrested earlier this month on... Read More

Who’s Afraid of William Barr?

Liberals and other Democrats seem to want to cover up the CIA’s role in Russiagate

Stephen F. Cohen • July 17, 2019

• 800 Words • Leave a Comment

William Barr, a two-time attorney general who served at the CIA in the 1970s, would seem to be an ultimate Washington insider. According to his Wikipedia biography, he has—or he had—“a sterling reputation” both among Republicans and Democrats. That changed when Barr announced his ongoing investigation into the origins of Russiagate, a vital subject I,... Read More

30 Years After Tiananmen Square, the U.S. Is Still Trying to Destabilize China

Max Parry • July 9, 2019

• 4,000 Words • 113 Comments • Reply

Last month marked three decades since the conclusion of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations in China. The anniversary is opportune for Washington and its Western partners to ramp-up their Sinophobic smear campaign while recycling the hoax they have propagated ever since the June Fourth incident occurred. Coverage of the commemoration has been wedded with the... Read More

Uyghurs, Political Islam & the BRI

Godfree Roberts • June 25, 2019

• 7,100 Words • 320 Comments • Reply

Since our media have confined themselves to unsupported allegations, I’ve collected several first-hand accounts of happenings in Xinjiang, an area of China I myself have never visited. Many Chinese consider Uyghurs the descendants of a marooned, white imperialist army living on land that was China’s long before they arrived. Edgar Snow[1] visited Xinjiang in 1937... Read More

Endless Procedural Abuses Show Julian Assange Case Was Never About Law

Jonathan Cook • May 29, 2019

• 2,500 Words • 57 Comments • Reply

It is astonishing how often one still hears well-informed, otherwise reasonable people say about Julian Assange: “But he ran away from Swedish rape charges by hiding in Ecuador’s embassy in London.” That short sentence includes at least three factual errors. In fact, to repeat it, as so many people do, you would need to have... Read More

Do Spies Run the World?

Israel Shamir • May 21, 2019

• 2,300 Words • 137 Comments • Reply

Jeeves, the excellent valet of Mr Wooster, had an ace up his sleeve: if going was tough, he had used his access to the records of the Junior Ganymede club, and there he could find embarrassing stuff against anybody who had ever employed a valet or a butler, for these gentleman’s gentlemen were obliged to... Read More

Why Shouldn’t the Boston Marathon Bomber Vote? U.S. Politicians Radicalized Him

Max Parry • May 14, 2019

• 3,000 Words • 50 Comments • Reply

Last month, 2020 U.S. presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders stirred controversy at a CNN town hall after answering a loaded question about whether his position on extending voting rights to incarcerated felons barred any exceptions such as the Boston Marathon bomber currently on death row. It was impossible for Sanders to respond honestly without being entrapped... Read More

Mueller & Mohamad Attah: Fake Intel Runs Through Prague, Part 1

Ilana Mercer • April 11, 2019

• 1,300 Words • 12 Comments • Reply

No, the moral of the Mueller inquisition is not that the Left is incorrigibly corrupt and morally and intellectually bankrupt, although this is certainly true. And, no. It’s not that the Republicans are meek, more eager for swamp-creature tenure than to save the country. However much state power flaccid Republicans capture, they quickly come to... Read More

Andrew Bacevich: Behind Fronds of Fakery, Here's Some Real News

Tom Engelhardt • April 7, 2019

• 400 Words • 1 Comment • Reply

Once upon a time, it was an “invisible government” -- or, at least, that’s what David Wise and Thomas Ross called it in their famed 1964 book of that title. Those two journalists, shining a bright light into “the shadows” of the Cold War, found the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies working assiduously to... Read More

Trump vs. the Spy Chiefs: Who's Right?

Pat Buchanan • February 1, 2019

• 900 Words • 51 Comments • Reply

To manifest his opposition to President Donald Trump's decision to pull all 2,000 U.S. troops out of Syria, and half of the 14,000 in Afghanistan, Gen. James Mattis went public and resigned as secretary of defense. Now Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, in public testimony to Congress, has contradicted Trump about the threats that... Read More

The CIA Then and Now: Old Wine in New Bottles

Edward Curtin • January 31, 2019

• 3,100 Words • 74 Comments • Reply

“And as the flames climbed high into the night To light the sacrificial rite I saw Satan laughing with delight The day the music died” – Don McLean, “American Pie” The Nazis had a name for their propaganda and mind-control operations: weltanschauungskrieg – “world view warfare.” As good students, they had learned many tricks of... Read More

Holding the Line on Torture

One Organization at a Time

Rebecca Gordon • September 9, 2018

• 2,700 Words • Leave a Comment

Sometimes the good guys do win. That’s what happened on August 8th in San Francisco when the Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association (APA) decided to extend a policy keeping its members out of the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The APA’s decision is important -- and not just symbolically. Today... Read More

Will the Real John Brennan Please Stand Up?

When will he answer for his war crimes?

Philip Giraldi • August 21, 2018

• 1,700 Words • 180 Comments • Reply

The battle between many former intelligence chiefs and the White House is becoming a gift that keeps on giving to the mass media, which is characteristically deeply immersed in Trump derangement syndrome in attacking the president for his having stripped former CIA Director John Brennan of his security clearance. One of the most ludicrous claims,... Read More

The CIA Owns the US and European Media

Paul Craig Roberts • August 18, 2018

• 2,200 Words

William Blum shares with us his correspondence with Washington Post presstitute Michael Birnbaum. As you can tell from Birnbaum’s replies, he comes across as either very stupid or as a CIA asset. When I received my briefing as staff associate, House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which required top secret clearance, I was told by senior members... Read More

American Pravda: the JFK Assassination, Part II – Who Did It?

Ron Unz • June 25, 2018

• 8,000 Words • 1,025 Comments • Reply

A strong dam may hold back an immense quantity of water, but once it breaks the resulting flood may sweep aside everything in its path. I had spent nearly my entire life never doubting that a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy nor that a different lone gunman took the... Read More

Haspel Is Not the Problem. the CIA Is the Problem.

Ron Paul • May 21, 2018

• 500 Words • 6 Comments • Reply

As a general rule, when Dick Cheney favors a foreign policy position it’s best to be on the opposite side if you value liberty over war and authoritarianism. The former vice president’s enthusiastic endorsement of not only Gina Haspel as CIA director but of the torture program she oversaw should tell us all we need... Read More

Democrats Confirm Torturer As Director of CIA

Paul Craig Roberts • May 19, 2018

• 600 Words

How did a person who should be in the criminal dock both in the US and in the International Criminal Court for running a torture prison get appointed the Director of the US Central Intelligence Agency? What is all the Washington talk about defending human rights when a torturer is put in charge of covert... Read More

De-Briefing Academics: Unpaid Intelligence Informants

James Petras • May 1, 2018

• 1,200 Words • 3 Comments • Reply

Introduction Over the past half-century, I have been engaged in research, lectured and worked with social movements and leftist governments in Latin America. I interviewed US officials and think tanks in Washington and New York. I have written scores of books, hundreds of professional articles and presented numerous papers at professional meetings. In the course,... Read More

Pompeo and Haspel Are Symptoms of a Deeper Problem

Ron Paul • March 19, 2018

• 500 Words • 3 Comments • Reply

President Trump’s recent cabinet shake-up looks to be a real boost to hard-line militarism and neo-conservatism. If his nominees to head the State Department and CIA are confirmed, we may well have moved closer to war.Before being chosen by Trump to head up the CIA, Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo was one of the... Read More

Brennan and Clapper: Elder Statesmen or Serial Fabricators?

Mike Whitney • November 17, 2017

• 1,700 Words • 53 Comments • Reply

On Sunday, Former CIA Director John Brennan and Former National Intelligence Director (NID) James Clapper appeared on CNN’s morning talk show, State of the Union, to discuss Donald Trump’s brief meeting with Vladimir Putin in Vietnam. The two ex-Intel chiefs were sharply critical of Trump and wondered why the president did not “not acknowledge and... Read More

Afghanistan and the CIA Heroin Ratline

Pepe Escobar • August 25, 2017

• 1,000 Words • Leave a Comment

The Persian Gulf harbors an array of extremely compromising secrets. Near the top is the Afghan heroin ratline – with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) positioned as the golden node of a transnational, trillion dollar heroin money laundering operation. In this 21st century Opium War, crops harvested in Afghanistan are essentially feeding the heroin market... Read More

Exploring the Shadows of America’s Security State

Or How I Learned Not to Love Big Brother

Alfred McCoy • August 24, 2017

• 4,500 Words • 34 Comments • Reply

[This piece has been adapted and expanded from the introduction to Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.] In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington pursued its elusive enemies across the landscapes of Asia and Africa, thanks in part to... Read More

Two CIA Contractors Successfully Sued for “Black Site” Torture

Hired psychologists devised "enhanced interrogation techniques” to break prisoners

Philip Giraldi • August 23, 2017

• 1,400 Words • Leave a Comment

Given the intense media coverage over Charlottesville, a recent small headlinelargely escaped notice, but it could have a major impact on how Americans come to terms with the excesses that developed from the “global war on terror.” For the first time, several individuals closely associated with the CIA torture program were about to become answerable... Read More

Groupthink at the CIA

Hating Russia and Trump is de rigueur

Philip Giraldi • August 1, 2017

• 1,800 Words • 172 Comments • Reply

Long ago, when I was a spear carrying middle ranker at CIA, a colleague took me aside and said that he had something to tell me “as a friend,” that was very important. He told me that his wife had worked for years in the Agency’s Administrative Directorate, as it was then called, where she... Read More

Truman Would Have Agreed with Trump on the CIA In Syria

Ilana Mercer • July 21, 2017

• 800 Words • 14 Comments • Reply

Said the president: "For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and, at times, a policy-making arm of the Government. ... [T]his quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being... Read More

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"CIA" Items Across Entire Archive

Category Classics

American Pravda: Our Coronavirus Catastrophe as Biowarfare Blowback?

Ron Unz

• 1,638 Comments • Reply

9/11 Was an Israeli Job

How America was neoconned into World War IV

Laurent Guyénot

• 444 Comments • Reply

John McCain and the POW Cover-Up

The “war hero” candidate buried information about POWs left behind in Vietnam.