Why has American been at war for the entire 21st century? What accounts for the reality of “endless wars,” a phrase that even President Biden used to justify U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan? One obvious answer is that the Washington foreign policymaking class–a community now known as “the Blob” to critics–favors military interventions and rejects non-military...
Category: Countries
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Washington Post Calls for an Investigation of COVID’s Origins
Last August, the Office of Director of National National Intelligence published an unclassified paper on the origins of COVID-19 saying the U.S. intelligence community broadly agreed the virus was not a biological weapons but was more divided on the question of whether the virus was genetically engineered. Given those rather equivocal findings, the editors of...
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Former Trump NSC Adviser Flynn Was Secretly Paid $200,000 in Middle East Nuclear Scheme
Michael Flynn, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the shortest-lived national security adviser in U.S. history (24 days), concealed payments from a U.S company seeking to build nuclear power plants in the Middle East. It was known Trump took money. Now SpyTalk (paywall) reports that he took $200,000 more. In June 2017, SpyTalk, then...
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The CIA Debated Kidnapping or Killing Julian Assange
This more than solid scoop comes from the very reliable Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor and Michael Isikoff at Yahoo News. While Assange had been on the radar of U.S. intelligence agencies for years, these plans for an all-out war against him were sparked by WikiLeaks’ ongoing publication of extraordinarily sensitive CIA hacking tools, known collectively as “Vault...
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Pakistan’s ISI Has a Message for the Taliban: You Owe Us
From Jonathan Broder at the reliable SpyTalk. You can’t understand Afghanistan without understanding the role of the Pakistani spy agency known as Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI. Islamabad publicly distanced itself from the Taliban, proclaiming Pakistan a loyal ally in the U.S. war on terror. But the ISI covertly continued its support for the group, giving...