“It’s a jump of nearly 150% from the last days of George W. Bush’s White House.”
“Former head of US Intelligence James Clapper just admitted ‘we tried to manipulate or influence elections or even overturned governments’ in those citizens’ ‘best interests’.”
“From Abu Ghraib in Iraq to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, the U.S. has engaged in brutal and violent abuse toward detainees suspected of terrorism — despite the fact that such brutality and abuse is what may have motivated many of those detainees to begin with.”
Read more: https://theintercept.com/2018/02/12/torture-terrorists-guantanamo-abu-ghraib/
“Citizens of the United States tend to have short memories. The historical reality is that Iran did have a secular, democratic government, led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh between 1951 and 1953 — but Mossadegh was removed from power in a coup organized and funded by the CIA and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6.”
Read more: https://theintercept.com/2018/02/05/iran-cia-coup-mossadegh-ayatollah/
“Why does the Bill of Rights protect us from the federal government rather than, say, from ISIS, terrorists, illegal immigrants, drug dealers, communists, Muslims, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Vietnam, Russia, or China? The answer is simple: Because the federal government, not those foreign entities, is the biggest threat to our country. That’s why the Bill of Rights focuses on it rather than on foreign entities. But here’s the kicker, the one no one (except libertarians) likes to think about: The threat that the federal government poses to the country comes primarily in the form of the troops — yes, the same troops that most everyone profusely thank for their ‘service.'”
Read more: https://www.fff.org/2018/02/01/biggest-threat-country/
“In Iraq, the U.S. morphed from heroic liberators into brutal occupiers within a matter of weeks. In Fallujah, which would later become an ISIS stronghold, U.S. troops opened fire on a crowd of peaceful protesters in April 2003, killing and wounding dozens of Iraqis. The shootings, the torture, the general chaos, all helped drive thousands of Iraqis from the minority Sunni community into the arms of radical groups led by brutal gangsters, such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in Iraq, formed in 2004 to fight U.S. troops and their local allies, was a precursor organization to … ISIS.”
Read more: https://theintercept.com/2018/01/29/isis-iraq-war-islamic-state-blowback/
“If I were to pick a single decision by an American president and his team in this century as our own August 1914, I would choose the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003. Of course, in that era of the ‘sole superpower,’ there were no other great powers (as in the World War I moment) ready to leap into the fray, so the unraveling that followed across a significant part of the planet would prove not to be a world war but a one-power hell on Earth. And it’s continued to unfold over nearly a decade and a half.”
“J. Wells Dixon, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said that formally making it U.S. policy ‘to detain Muslims forever without charge in an offshore prison’ is ‘politically expedient but exceedingly stupid no matter how you look at it,’ except as a terrorist recruitment bonanza.”
“What has been the outcome of this 16-year quagmire in Afghanistan? The nation-building war that Bush, Obama and now Trump continue to wage has destabilized neighboring Pakistan further.”
Read more: http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=9242
“American forces went to Syria with the declared objective of pushing the ISIS terror gang out of territory it had seized there. This has been accomplished. It is an ideal moment for the U.S. to declare victory and depart. That, however, would be hauling down our flag. By Roosevelt’s logic — and evidently Tillerson’s — American soldiers should not be withdrawn from any country where they have ever been deployed.”