Issues of war and peace were barely mentioned in last night’s Democratic debates. Maybe it was the moderators’ fault, but the candidates didn’t seem too eager to talk either. The ongoing U.S.-sponsored wars (“interventions”) in Syria, Yemen, and Somalia went unmentioned. Only two candidates spoke about Afghan war, now in its 19th year. Cory Booker...
Category: Middle East
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As CIA Steps Up Operations, Iran Again Claims to Have Arrested 17 U.S. Spies
The intelligence agencies of Iran and the United States are at war, even if the two countries are not. As the Trump administration applies “maximum pressure” to Iran, Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) responds with a claim that it has arrested 17 CIA spies in the country. At a news conference in Tehran,...
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How Trump Got the Upper Hand on the Secret Agencies
Max Blumenthal is nothing if not provocative. When the independent journalist was scheduled to give a book talk earlier this month at Politics and Prose, Washington’s premier book chain, the prospect of a public discussion of his relentless new book, The Management of Savagery, provoked the Syrian-American Council to protest so vociferously that the event...
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JFK Confronted Israel Over Its Secret Nuclear Program
Avner Cohen and Bill Burr are two of the best historians on the secret Israeli nuclear program of the 1960s, which made Israel the Middle East’s first nuclear power. It almost didn’t happen. In a brief for the non-profit National Security Archives and an article for Haaretz.com,Cohen and Burr explain that the program was almost...
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A Primer on U.S. False Flag Operations
A “false flag operation” is a time-tested technique of intelligence services. It is the propagation of a vicious lie–the false attribution of a deed to the enemy–so as to justify war. From the explosion on the Maine battleship in Havana Harbor in 1898 to the supposed attack on U.S Navy ships in Vietnam’s Gulf of...