In 2010, WikiLeaks became a household name by releasing 251,287 classified State Department cables. Now, a new book collects in-depth analyses of what these cables tell us about the foreign policy of the United States, from authors including Truthout staff reporter Dahr Jamail and our regular contributors Gareth Porter, Robert Naiman, Phyllis Bennis and Stephen Zunes. “The essays that make up The WikiLeaks Files shed critical light on a once secret history,” says Edward Snowden.
The US are trying to salvage the remnants of their comic-book Syrian narrative, hiding behind the transparent diversionary claim the Russians are bombing “non-ISIS rebels”, hoping, forlornly no one will be smart enough to realise this essentially means “al Qaeda/al Nusra”, and amounts to an admission the US is working with the group they used to claim were the embodiment of evil.
President Obama insists on looking the gift horse of Russian military help for Syria’s embattled government in the mouth. Rather than welcome assistance in blocking a Sunni extremist victory, Obama bends to the neocons and liberal hawks, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern explains.
For all of the celebration of him as a “grand strategist,” as someone who constantly advises presidents to think of the future, to base their actions today on where they want the country to be in five or 10 years’ time, Kissinger was absolutely blind to the fundamental feebleness and inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union. None of it was necessary; none of the lives Kissinger sacrificed in Cambodia, Laos, Angola, Mozambique, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, East Timor, and Bangladesh made one bit of difference in the outcome of the Cold War.
But Saudi Arabia’s spare capacity to pump like crazy can only last so long. A new peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering anticipates that Saudi Arabia will experience a peak in its oil production, followed by inexorable decline, in 2028 – that’s just 13 years away.
A Saudi airstrike in the Yemeni village of Bani Zela in the northwestern province of Hjjah kills at least 25 civilians, mostly women and children, residents and medics say.
“People were fleeing their homes as the helicopters pursued, They committed a massacre for no reason,” one resident, calling himself Khaled, said on Sunday.
Pope Francis may be a breath of fresh air compared with his predecessors from his humble embrace of the poor and socially marginalised. But he still retains the stench of sycophancy towards the world’s biggest criminal state-sponsor of war and terrorism. God Bless America indeed.
According to Stone, the U.S. government’s destabilizing role actually goes back much further than ISIS. His new series pinpoints moments of American intrusion in the region as far back as the 1930s and follows it all the way to the CIA-backed Iranian coup in 1953, support for Afghanistan-based, anti-Soviet Union militants in the 1980s, George H.W. Bush’s Iraq invasion of 1990, and present-day efforts in Iran, Syria, and other countries.
Islamist groups are being activated and supplied by the Western-backed Saudi coalition to help prosecute the counterinsurgency war against the rebels. The rebel Popular Committees are calling for a pluralist democratic government in Yemen, which would mark a dramatic change from decades of Western and Saudi-backed dictatorships in the country.
Britain is complicit with Obama’s war – selling Saudi Arabia deadly weapons like Washington. Days earlier, Oxfam CEO Mark Goldring said Yemen “descended into a humanitarian disaster putting its people at risk of famine, and the UK is materially involved through its export of arms and military support to the bombing campaign.”
The overarching framework, Chomsky points out, is the so-called Clinton Doctrine, named after former US president Bill Clinton. The doctrine asserts that United States is entitled to the ‘unilateral use of military power’ to ensure ‘uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources’. This entitlement is dressed up as alleged ‘security’ or ‘humanitarian’ concerns.
Iran and Turkey could assist Russia if Greece fulfills the US’ request to close its airspace to Russian aircraft carrying humanitarian aid to war-torn Syria.
