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. [...]

The unearthing of classified memos, revealing that Tony Blair committed Britain to following the US into the war in Iraq, regardless of its legality, suggests the net may finally be closing in on a man whom many consider a war criminal. The UK tabloid, the Mail on Sunday, has published damning memos that show the former British PM had agreed to the invasion of Iraq a full year before it had be [...]

Former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, committed the UK to joining the US invasion of Iraq a year before it began, a newly disclosed White House memo reveals. The US documents obtained by the Daily Mail and published on Sunday are part of the batch of emails from the private server of former US State Secretary, Hillary Clinton, which US courts have made her disclose. [...]

The spat between two leading GOP presidential nomination candidates has sunk to a new low, as Donald Trump and Jeb Bush spent the entire weekend throwing non-stop barbs at each other, with Bush forced to defend his family honor over 9/11. The feud heated up on Friday, when the property mogul appeared to imply that George W. Bush was at least partly at fault for the 2001 attacks that brought dow [...]

Since Moscow joined the struggle against Islamic State in Syria, its military efforts in the region have become a target in themselves with western mainstream media attacking Moscow, publishing unconfirmed reports and scaremongering at every opportunity. A drone over Turkey near the Syrian border is one of the recent "Russian" targets. After the Turkish military released a statement saying that [...]

It's like our Nobel Peace Prize winning president once said: "We must declare war on war, so the outcome will be peace upon peace." “More proof we're living in an Orwell novel: Obama Told You We Were Training ISIL Forces. On Twitter [...]

From one fiasco to another: Washington has failed to change the regime in Syria, failed to effectively fight ISIL, and now wants Russia to fail. At the same time, Obama appears to be willing to arm any anti-regime fighter who can carry a gun. What could possibly go wrong with that? CrossTalking with Philippe Assouline, Marcus Papadopoulos, and Roshan Muhammed Salih. [...]

Guilt-ridden American drone pilots continue to quit in unprecedented numbers. One former secret mission operator, Brandon Bryant, who’s received a whistle-blower award, spoke to RT of the horrors of indiscriminate killing from a safe distance. “The people that are giving the order to kill – they don’t care who gets killed as long as their target gets attacked… they’ll take out howev [...]

US has been getting ready for a possible war involving Russia in Europe’s Baltic States, German media reports. The report says all the NATO war games organized in the region by Washington have been intended to prepare various military response scenarios. The Pentagon has shifted its military thinking when it comes to Moscow, selecting Russia’s direct neighbors in the Baltic region as the ba [...]