Official Washington says it welcomes freedom of thought, but there is a startling absence of diverse opinions especially on key foreign-policy topics, such as Russia’s President Putin. In those cases, shallow “group think” prevails and belligerent “information warfare” rules, as Gilbert Doctorow observes. By Gilbert Doctorow The U.S. establishment writers on Russia are one and all…
The U.S. Congress, still in thrall to Israeli leaders and the neocons, cited Islamic State terrorism as an excuse to clamp down on travel to Iran even though Iran has nothing to with ISIS or other Sunni jihadists, unlike Saudi Arabia and Persian Gulf states that were left off the list, notes ex-CIA analyst Paul R.…
Next month’s peace talks in Geneva to resolve the Syrian conflict could fail because the U.S. has no coherent policy in putting back together the broken nation’s of Iraq and Syria. Voice of America reports: One major problem, according to current and former intelligence and military officials, is that U.S. policy has simply not adjusted to the complex realities on the ground. “I haven’t seen any indication that the U.S. has a coherent plan for dealing with failed states,” former CIA Director James Woolsey told VOA.
One month ago, after a farcial year-long campaign to "destroy" ISIS, which achieved absolutely nothing but made the Islamic State grow bigger and stronger, culminating with the numerous terrorist attacks in the month of November, former CIA deputy director Michael Morell told Charlie Rose on PBS that the reason the US had never actually gone after the lifeblood of the ISIS regime, its oil supply chain, infrastructure and products, was because "we didn’t want to do environmental damage, and we didn’t want to destroy that infrastructure."
We’ve written quite a bit this year about the fiscal crises unfolding among America’s state and local governments. Illinois became something of a poster child for the problem when, in May, the state Supreme Court struck down a pension reform bid, triggering a Moody’s downgrade for Chicago.
After that, the situation in Springfield worsened materially and before you knew it, the state was paying out lottery winnings in IOUs and missing hundreds of millions in pension payments.