When I was a kid, three presidents told us we had to fight in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, because if we didn’t fight them over there, we’d have to fight them on the beaches of California. We believed. It was a lie. I was a teenager during the Cold War, and several presidents told us we needed to create massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons, garrison the world, invade Cuba, fight in odd litt [...]

Brace yourselves. Honoring a perhaps questionable tradition dating to 1898, a marble bust of warmonger, murderer, liar and despised cretin Dick Cheney will be installed in the Capitol's Emancipation Hall (sic). [...]

News headlines this week of epidemic drug abuse and mortality among Americans confirm what many observers have already noted – America is in bad, bad shape. But despite the media coverage, there was little commentary on the backdrop to the malaise. American society is collapsing because of an epic failure in the economy. [...]

Newly acquired documents show the Pentagon spent nearly $400 million, or $2 million per fighter, on its failed train-and-equip program, according to USA Today. The Pentagon claims the actual cost was $30,000 per trainee. [...]

Damascus is opposed to having US troops on its soil, thus the US is committing aggression and international crimes against the nation of Syria, says Daniel McAdams, executive director of the Ron Paul Institute. [...]

In a move that critics says fulfills long-held warnings of "mission creep" and amount to throwing "gasoline on a fire," the Obama administration on Friday announced that U.S. ground troops will now be deployed inside Syria. In strategic leaks to various media outlets, the Pentagon made clear the president's plan to send approximately 50 Special Operations soldiers inside the war-torn country. R [...]

A study, to appear in the Fall 2014 issue of the academic journal Perspectives on Politics, finds that the U.S. is no democracy, but instead an oligarchy, meaning profoundly corrupt, so that the answer to the study’s opening question, "Who governs? Who really rules?" To put it short: The United States is no democracy, but actually an oligarchy. [...]

Official Washington’s neocon-dominated “group think” on Syria is that everything is the fault of President Assad and Russian President Putin, but the actual history shows many missed opportunities for peace because of the U.S. obsession with dictating “regime change” in country after country, as Jonathan Marshall explains. [...]

Sending some 50 US advisers to Syria illegally to train the so-called ‘moderate rebels’ looks like a calculated move. If, or when, someone gets hurt, the US will have a pretext for boots on the ground, believes retired US Air Force Lieutenant Col Karen Kwiatkowski. Does this deployment mean Americans will be putting themselves in the direct line of fire in Syria? [...]

Obama’s decision to send Special Forces into Syria is being widely viewed as a US military escalation in the country. The troop dispatch also signals that the US trying to forestall Russian successes in wiping out Washington’s regime-change assets in Syria. In short, the US Special Forces are being used as “human shields” to curb Russian air strikes against anti-government mercenaries, [...]

Thanks to the pressure of civil liberties organizations and heavy-hitters in the tech industry, President Barack Obama will now have to publicly comment on his position on strong encryption. The savecrypto.org petition requested the Obama administration to publicly affirm their support for strong encryption and “[r]eject any law, policy, or mandate that would undermine our security.” [...]

Republican Paul Ryan of Wisconsin was elected Speaker of the House, defeating Democrat Nancy Pelosi. The 45-year-old has become the youngest congressman to serve as the House leader since 1869. Of the 432 votes cast, 236 went to Ryan and 184 to Pelosi. [...]

The US would not be keen to pursue a trade deal with Britain if it were to leave the European Union, one American official has said.It marks the first public acknowledgement by the US of a stance on the upcoming referendum. [...]

If Middle East strongmen Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were still in this world, it would have been a better place, because what came instead is much worse, US presidential candidate Donald Trump said. Asked by CNN's Jake Tapper on his State of the Union show whether the world would have been better off with Hussein and Gaddafi still ruling in Iraq and Syria, Trump said “100 percent.” [...]

Former UK PM Tony Blair should be indicted by the International Criminal Court for leading Britain into an illegal war with Iraq, resulting in millions of deaths and the rise of Islamic State, says Neil Clark, a journalist and a broadcaster. The former British Prime Minister admitted in an interview with CNN that there are “elements of truth” to the supposition that the US-led Iraq invasio [...]

Israel wanted to send commandos to break into the Fordo nuclear facility in Iran and sabotage it from the inside, WSJ reports. The US considered it a suicide mission and refused to sell Israel military hardware that could be used in such a raid. [...]

By holding military exercises NATO is sending a message to Russia and preparing public opinion in the West that Russia constitutes an existential threat to the US and, therefore, there must be a new arms race, says Brian Becker from the anti-war ANSWER Coalition. [...]

Anxiety is growing in the bond market as the US gets closer to a potentially catastrophic default if Congress does not raise the $18.1 trillion debt ceiling by November 3. Neither the House of Representatives nor the Senate have offered a bill which would allow Washington to escape disaster. [...]

The whistleblower organization WikiLeaks has published a second set of documents obtained from CIA Director John Brennan’s personal email account. The first set of documents published on Wednesday contained reports on Afghanistan and torture, and ideas for US policy towards Iran. [...]

A surveillance bill that is the third attempt by lawmakers to institute controversial internet security reforms has cleared a crucial vote in the Senate. A vote of 83-14 to end debate on a bundle of amendments to the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) went through the Senate on Thursday. [...]

President Barack Obama has vetoed the military funding bill passed by Congress, envisioning almost $1 billion in aid to Syrian rebels and the Ukrainian government. As the primary reason for vetoing the House Resolution 1735, as the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act is known, Obama cited the allocation of $38 billion into a war fund not subject to budget caps, [...]

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified before the 17-month-old House Select Committee on Benghazi for the first time. The daylong hearing often turned into shouting matches between lawmakers, while Clinton looked on bored or amused. [...]