The crowing by Donald Trump that he “terminated” the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, Major General Qaseem Soleimani, simply because Trump believed, mobster-style, that he had it coming, should remind the world that the United States government stands as the world’s record-holder in either directly carrying out or coordinating with other parties the assassination of political leaders, American and foreign. Continue reading
Stanford University’s Hoover Institution still echoes the dire warning Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered in a January 13 speech. The speech, titled “The Restoration of Deterrence: The Iranian Example,” set forth a new policy of deterring “threats” to American interests by carrying out future political assassinations like that of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Al Quds Force commander Major General Qaseem Soleimani and Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis at Baghdad International Airport. Pursuant to this same new policy, the chief treasurer for the Quds Force, General Abdul Reza Shahlai, narrowly escaped assassination in Yemen by American military forces. Continue reading
Throughout his military command of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ elite Quds Force, the late Major General Qassem Soleimani ensured that Iran had as its disposal an intricate network of military proxy forces, sympathetic Shi’a Islamic faithful, and armed wings of foreign political and religious allies prepared to respond to an American and/or Israeli military attack. With the Donald Trump administration’s assassination of Soleimani and Iraqi Shi’a militia leaders, all of whom were popular in Iran and Iraq for helping to defeat the Saudi/Israeli-supported Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria, the Iranian retaliatory network established by Soleimani stands at a hair-trigger response to the U.S. premeditated murders. The network of Iranian proxies and allies crafted under Soleimani’s guidance—mostly non-state actors but with a few state players—will be Soleimani’s everlasting legacy in future history books on the Middle East and strategic warfare. Continue reading
Propaganda disguised, sometimes believably, as actual news. Age-old religious teachings being transformed into the dogma of political cults. And now, historical facts being discarded and replaced with alternate chronicles of humanity’s past. Such is the nature of information warfare now being waged by political hucksters, hoaxers, and hustlers on a global scale. Never before have the basics of primary, secondary, and collegiate education been more important in guarding against the whimsical fantasies and alternate realities of politicians like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, Boris Johnson, and others in their mold. Continue reading
It was less than five years ago that U.S. troops in Iraq were coordinating with Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani and members of his elite Al Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) attacks on the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Iraq. The Al Quds Force is the foreign expeditionary arm of the IRGC. Continue reading
The two major political parties, the Conservatives and Labor, are mere shadows of their former selves. Fresh from a major landslide victory in England, the Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is now a hard-right party. Traditional Tories like Nicholas Soames, the grandson of Winston Churchill, and Kenneth Clarke, the grand old man of Conservative Party politics, were expelled as members of the Conservative ranks sitting in the House of Commons as a result of their September 2019 vote against Johnson’s government and their pro-European Union positions. With Johnson’s December 12 election victory, backing for Johnson’s Conservatives has come from such far-right stalwarts as Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage and the Britain First movement of neo-fascist street hooligan Tommy Robinson. Continue reading
Donald John Trump has turned back the clock in the Western Hemisphere to an era that saw coups and political unrest as the order of the day. Trump and his administration of far-right anti-socialists and pro-fascists have already overthrown the democratically-elected government of President Evo Morales of Bolivia. Trump has announced a policy of turning up the heat on President Nicolas Maduro’s government in Venezuela by ratcheting up the economic blockade of Cuba, a Venezuelan ally. Continue reading
Future historians, if they exist, will look back in amazement at the leaders of three nations in particular. The leaders—Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and US President Donald Trump—not only ignore, but criticized and question solid scientific data that the planet is in extreme environmental danger of a global catastrophe. Making matters worse, these leaders continue to advocate for damaging measures—coal burning, rainforest destruction, and fossil fuel vehicles—that worsen the extinction-level peril to humans and most other living things on the planet. Our future historians will discuss whether the political leadership of the early 21st century was driven by some crazed religious desire for “specicide” of the human race, as well as other species. Continue reading
The world is currently mired in massive malfeasance in office by senior government officials, including heads of state and government, who are more interested in personal gain than in government service. Mixed in with financial and political scandals in dozens of nations is the specter of some government officials being involved in illegal sexual activities with underage individuals. Continue reading
There is a rather vocal sector of the so-called “progressive left” that has decided it is best to tolerate Donald Trump and his administration’s fascist policies. This is mainly because Trump has made a few narrowly-focused decisions that the pro-Trump “left” happens to support. The Trump decisions that have enamored the faux left include the much-ballyhooed “withdrawal” of U.S. military forces from Syria—actually, some of those forces remain in-country—as well as trash talking NATO and U.S. bilateral military alliances with South Korea and Japan. Continue reading
The recent coup d’état in Bolivia that overthrew President Evo Morales was not merely a standard right-wing putsch aided and abetted by the US Central Intelligence Agency but also placed into power politicians affiliated with a rising fundamentalist Protestant movement in Latin America that can be termed “Christo-fascist.” Many of the far-right and out-of-the-mainstream Protestant sects that have gained power in Guatemala, Colombia, Brazil, and, now, Bolivia have decried traditional Roman Catholicism in Latin America as heretical to their religious ideology and even pro-Communist. As for mainstream Protestant religions, the fundamentalist sects view them as hopelessly liberal, as well as heretical. Continue reading
Donald Trump, who has a schoolboy’s view of Native Americans as having been “savages” who besieged wagon trains of “peaceful” European settlers, has chalked up on his record of seedy deeds the military overthrow of Bolivia’s first Native American president, Evo Morales, an ethnic Aymara. Trump has been eyeing Morales, the leader of Bolivia’s Movement toward Socialism (MAS) party, for some form of retribution ever since Morales scolded Trump in person during a meeting of the United Nations Security Council on September 26, 2018. Continue reading
Not content with the annual November observance of National Native American Heritage Month, which has been promulgated by every president since George H. W. Bush in 1990, Donald Trump issued a proclamation, published in the Federal Register, also naming November as “National American History and Founders Month.” The White House observance of November to honor the white European settlers who initiated the genocide of the Native American peoples in North America fits into Trump’s championship of white nationalist causes and further erodes his relationship with America’s tribal nations and communities. Continue reading
Frankfort, the capital of Kentucky, which most people get wrong in trivia contests, may soon be in the headlines around the world. What Republican state Senate President Robert Stivers said about the close gubernatorial election that saw Democratic Attorney General Andrew Beshear edge out a close victory over Republican incumbent Matt Bevin, a Trump loyalist, should normally shock the nation. But in the era of Trump, taking non-democratic actions to maintain political power is the new reality. Continue reading
A year ago, the corporatists and anti-socialist militarists in the Donald Trump administration appeared ecstatic over the electoral successes of neo-fascism in Latin America. Jair Bolsonaro, a self-proclaimed admirer of Adolf Hitler and who is nicknamed the “Trump of the Tropics,” sat in the presidential palace in Brazil; billionaire right-winger Sebastian Pinera had, once again, become president of Chile; and Lenin Moreno, the one-time leftist and progressive ally of former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, had invited the US military back into his country and made common cause with the Lima Group, an anti-Nicolas Maduro bloc subservient to Washington. Continue reading
Historically a cipher and pass-through for the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been transformed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, at the urging of Donald Trump, into an aggressive business intelligence operation designed to financially benefit Trump’s top donors in private industry. USAID is a component of the U.S. State Department and is officially tasked with managing U.S. foreign assistance programs, mostly in developing countries. Continue reading
The revelations that businessmen tied to Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash and other foreign interests funneled campaign cash into the coffers of several Republican Party politicians, including the president, senators, U.S. representatives, and governors is like a case of déjà vu. In 1940, the United States first began to take seriously foreign cash donations to U.S. political campaigns in the months preceding the U.S. entry into World War II. Continue reading
One of the tropes Israel and its international phalanx of lobbyists has used since the state’s inception in 1948 is that “Poor Little Israel” requires Western money and diplomatic support because the small country is surrounded by hostile Arab countries. Neither of these contentions have ever been true. Continue reading
Donald Trump, who believes everything that is real is fake and everything that is fake is real, has delved into another academic discipline for which he believes he is an eminent expert. After promulgating his own fake weather forecasts, political opinion polls, and news, Trump has now proclaimed his own fake history. After abandoning to invading Turkish forces the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) forces, who have been allied with US Special Forces battling the Islamic State caliphate jihadists in Syria, Trump stated, “They [the Kurds] didn’t help us in the World War II, they didn’t help us with Normandy, as an example.” Continue reading
By Donald Trump’s own admission and through documents provided by an Intelligence Community whistleblower and former U.S. special envoy for Ukraine Paul Volker it is known that the Trump administration pressured at least four countries to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. The countries identified as being involved in the Trump operation thus far are Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Australia, and China. The attack on the Democratic Party’s leading presidential candidate in 2020 is far worse than that carried out by Richard Nixon henchmen G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, Donald Segretti, and Charles Colson in the Watergate scandal and events surrounding it. Continue reading
There are several correlations currently being made between the current move by the US Congress to impeach Donald Trump for high crimes and misdemeanors and a similar action that resulted in the resignation of President Richard Nixon as a result of the Watergate scandal. However, there is a major difference between then and now: The Internet and the dissonant cacophony of polemics from non-journalists whose sole goal is to muddy the informational waters with far-out conspiracy theories and libelous prose. Continue reading
With a dangerous right-wing and quasi-fascist administration in power in Washington, one that rejects internationalism and consensus-building, it is past time for the United Nations to move its headquarters and member states’ permanent missions to a more neutral location. One can understand why the UN was originally located in New York. The Rockefeller family donated the land on Turtle Bay on the East River for the construction of UN Headquarters. After World War II, the United States was in a prime position to nurture the UN, something it failed to do after World War I when Washington rejected membership in the League of Nations. Continue reading
In July 2018, White House leaks indicated that Donald Trump gave his personal mobile phone number to various foreign leaders. Although Trump is known to have phoned some foreign leaders over his official White House landline, he is also known to call some leaders using his mobile phones on a whim and while some of his calls’ recipients, in Asia, for example, are asleep. Trump is also known to use multiple cell phones to call foreign leaders. Criminals, including narco-lords and drug smugglers, often use multiple “burner” phones in the hope they can evade detection and eavesdropping by law enforcement. Continue reading
The Central Intelligence Agency, founded largely by a bunch of self-entitled graduates of America’s Ivy League universities and alum of secretive fraternities – particularly Yale and the Skulls and Bones — appears to be re-indulging in some of its worst antics of the Cold War years. Many CIA plank owners joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, a convenient way for them to avoid combat and killing Nazis, for whom they had some ideological sympathies. Continue reading
The disclosure by the British Parliament of the “Most Sensitive” Operation YELLOWHAMMER document describes a United Kingdom ripe for the machinations of Britain’s proto fascists, who make up a large part of the Tory government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson. YELLOWHAMMER’s prediction of economic and social chaos in the United Kingdom resulting from a hard-British exit (BREXIT) from the European Union will have dire consequences for the rule of law and democracy throughout the United Kingdom. Continue reading
Shortly before proroguing Parliament, British Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson was ordered to release a classified report titled Operation Yellowhammer, a government-wide survey of how a no-deal British exit from the European Union (Brexit) would affect citizens of the United Kingdom and its territories, including three crown dependencies. The document that was officially released by the British government contains a redacted paragraph (number 15). However, WMR was able to obtain the paragraph and included it in our unredacted copy of the Yellowhammer document. Continue reading
Modern diplomacy can generally be traced back to the late 19th century and the intercession of professional diplomats in the foreign relations between major and minor powers of the era. International negotiations to resolve problems were primarily handled by diplomats prior to politicians giving their assent to peace treaties and compacts. The Congress of Berlin of 1878 and 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth (New Hampshire) helped resolve the Russo-Turkish War and Russo-Japanese War, respectively. These early diplomatic efforts would eventually lead to treaties establishing the League of Nations, the International Court of Justice, and the United Nations, in addition to a variety of regional and specialized international agencies. Each of these international agencies brought into being a corps of international diplomats who, for the most part, were committed to hammering out disputes between nations through negotiations and not armed conflict. The lessons of World Wars I and II provided an impetus for nations to commit to dialogue rather than war. Continue reading
Anyone who has ever cared for a relative or a close friend suffering from dementia is well aware of the effects of this debilitating disease. Living with a dementia sufferer is as bad, if not worse, for the care giver as it is for the person afflicted. Obsessive compulsiveness, irrational outbursts such as inappropriate laughing, crying or yelling, insensitive bigoted comments, and voicing strange ideas are only a part of a dementia patient’s overall symptoms. Continue reading
Not since the Third Reich regime of Adolf Hitler have Nordic nations been forced to deal with a megalomaniac foreign leader like Donald Trump. Trump has summarily criticized the prime ministers of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, lied about a conversation with the president of Finland; and is likely to soon turn his Twitter venom on the prime minister of Iceland. The five Nordic leaders serve as heads of government of five countries that annually top the world’s list of happiest nations because of their policies that put the health and welfare of their people first. Continue reading
Donald Trump wants to buy Greenland, an autonomous constituent part of the Kingdom of Denmark. If any other US president proffered such an idea, it would be viewed as a joke. But with Trump, it is a serious proposal, according to White House insiders who passed the information to The Wall Street Journal. Continue reading
Further pushing his cruelty from caged migrant children separated from their families at the southern border to yet other children coming home from school in Mississippi to find their parents having been hauled off by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detention centers, Donald Trump has now turned his attention to needlessly harming animals. Trump is a well-known critic of pet owners, including his own vice president, referring to them as “low class.” Continue reading
RSS
They like to get the landmarks
Posted on January 16, 2020 by Wayne Madsen
In the 2016 science fiction sequel, Independence Day: Resurgence, actor Jeff Goldblum, describing the targeting priorities of aliens invading the Earth, says, “They like to get the landmarks.” In both Independence Day and its sequel, movie viewers were treated to scenes of macabre-looking extraterrestrials destroying the Empire State Building, the White House, Los Angeles’s Tower Records building, and London’s Tower Bridge and “the Eye” wheel. Continue reading →