Politics

Members of the GOP foreign policy establishment are open to supporting Hillary Clinton for president if that’s what it takes to prevent Donald Trump from becoming commander in chief. As The Hill reports, a number of prominent Republicans who signed a scathing open letter denouncing Trump said they aren’t wavering from their opposition to him..."Donald Trump is not a Republican. ... He is a caricature of classless wealth. ... He is a caricature of the ugly American."

A federal court ruling against the ban of growing medical marijuana introduced by the previous Conservative government, was confirmed by Canada’s new Liberal government on Thursday. It allows medical marijuana users to regain their right to grow their own cannabis herbs to fight common diseases that modern medicine cannot help with. Medical Daily reports: The federal government said Canada’s medical marijuana laws would be rewritten to reflect the court’s judgment, setting a deadline of Aug. 24 to finalize the changes.

President Obama wants to see his refusal to bomb Syria in 2013 as his “liberation day” from Official Washington’s expectations, but he promptly put himself back into captivity, writes Robert Parry. In late August 2013, with Barack Obama on the verge of launching retaliatory airstrikes against the Syrian military for its alleged role in a lethal sarin gas attack, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper informed the President that U.S. intelligence doubted that Bashar al-Assad’s government was actually responsible, causing Obama to pull back from the attack. The disclosure that U.S.

ISIS have killed at least 29 people in a suicide bomb attack at a football stadium in Baghdad, Iraq.  Security officials say that 29 people are confirmed dead, with a further 60 seriously injured. The attack took place during a football match in the city of Iskanderiyah, 30 miles from the capital. Aljazeera.com reports: The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group that controls swathes of territory in Iraq’s north and west was behind the attack, according to Amaq news agency, which is affiliated with the group.

Ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern explains to Americans who naively ask, “why does the world hates us?” and why seasoned intelligence professionals reaffirm that torture is not only unjust, but does not work in getting good results, despite propagation from “tough on terror” politicians. It may seem counterintuitive that those whose analysis has been correct on key issues that the U.S. government got criminally wrong – like the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – would be blacklisted from “mainstream” media and ostracized by the Smart People of the Establishment. Alas, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.