Our ruling class’s judgment that America’s killing of terror master Qassem Soleimani united Iran’s people behind its regime is characteristic of their incompetence. Instead, because the Islamic Republic’s armed forces incompetently shot down an airliner full of students as the mullahs were engaged in the pseudo-sophisticated pretense of retaliation against the United States, and because
Turkish troops are landing in Libya with the mission of trying to ensure the survival of the government headed by Prime Minister Al Sarraj, besieged in Tripoli by the faction headed by General Khalifa Haftar, weakly supported by Italy, that now controls the rest of the country. Thus does Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan intend to
Does the U.S. armed forces’ killing of Qassem Soleimani, leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ foreign wing, and his subordinate, Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, outside Baghdad’s airport increase or decrease the chances of war with Iran? Does it mean a continuation of our disastrous endless wars? These questions reflect confusion about war in general and
When Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December 9 report did not challenge the claim by the FBI (and the CIA) that its surveillance and investigation of all things Trump were properly “premised”; when it failed to address the illegality of officials’ trafficking to the media information from said surveillance; when it downgraded the FBI’s
The Justice Department’s inspector general has concluded that, although officials of the FBI, the Justice Department, and the CIA made copious “mistakes” in their four requests to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency, those officials did nothing that warrants punishment. They mostly followed procedures and, after all, the
Regardless of who wins in 2020, the mega-issue that drove the 2016 elections will grip the country more intensely than ever. From President Obama on down, the political, educational, media, and corporate establishment had long since taken for granted that placing the opinions, interests, tastes, and the rights of the rest of America on the
The Justice Department’s inspector general this month reprimanded the FBI for the manner in which it recruits and supervises its “confidential human sources.” To the layman, this seems about technicalities. In fact, it shows that one of the CIA’s deadliest dysfunctions now infects the FBI as well. This disease consists of choosing and rejecting sources
The would-be impeachers had been salivating at the prospect that John Bolton, who President Trump had fired after 17 months as his national security advisor, would lend his undoubted “conservative bona fides” to their campaign to convince Americans that Trump is bad, awful, illegitimate, dangerous, even criminal. Lately however, they have settled on doing with
Dogs biting humans being naturally unremarkable, any attempt to convince us to regard accounts of their biting as noteworthy events leads one to ask whether the person advancing that position is ignorant of nature, or is toying with us. By nature, instances of bureaucrats speaking ill of their elected superiors are equally unremarkable and lead
Americans are just beginning to realize that opposition to Donald Trump is the least explanation for what bureaucrats, corporate officials and media magnates have been doing to negate the outcome of the 2016 election. Denying that government by the people is the only legitimate form of rule, they are asserting that legitimate rule flows from
