Author Archives: Wayne Madsen

Hollywood and its glitterati of actors, writers, and other celebrities has often been known as a bastion for political correctness and progressive politics. However, even in this most anti-Donald Trump of all locales in the United States, the effects of Trump’s insensitive bombast has triggered a wave of sympatico comments from those employed by Hollywood’s entertainment industry. Continue reading →

Donald Trump, who fancies himself as the grand artist of deal making, just made a series of terrible deals with the radical Wahhabist government of Saudi Arabia. Trump signed a deal with the Saudis, which was negotiated largely by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, to provide the kingdom with military hardware, including advanced fighter jets, tanks, artillery, precision-guided munitions, and radar systems. The package could be worth as much as $360 billion. The Saudis will undoubtedly use their American-provided weapons to continue atrocities against the people of Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain, where Saudi military forces have been involved in internal rebellions on behalf of radical Sunni interests. Continue reading →

Trump World is turning into the worst sort of LSD trip imaginable. First, Donald Trump’s Twitter tirades lambasted in all capital letters—meaning shouting—FAKE NEWS, which in his mind is any press account with which he disagrees. Now, Trump is reinventing history, suggesting in an interview that what we know from history books; first-hand accounts, including handwritten letters and diaries; and countless films and television documentaries is FAKE HISTORY. According to Trump, Andrew Jackson, a vicious slave owner and genocidaire of Native Americans, could have prevented the Civil War, even though Jackson died sixteen years before the war began. Continue reading →

A series of moves by NATO’s Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI) partner, the United Arab Emirates, has many observers in the Indian Ocean littoral nations wondering out loud whether the “North Atlantic” military pact is moving into the Indian Ocean and Arabian Peninsula, courtesy of an “outsourcing” deal with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations. Continue reading →

Donald Trump’s neocon cabal of National Security Adviser General H. R. McMaster and his assistants Dina Powell and Fiona Hill, the latter in charge of the National Security Council’s Russia desk, are poor choices to gauge subtle messages coming out of North Korea. McMaster, a student of professional Army pencil sharpener David Petraeus, fails to grasp that there are many more methods to ascertain the policies of a secretive country like North Korea. Beyond technical products, such as imagery and signals intelligence, and neocon drivel from such outfits as the Brookings Institution, Council on Foreign Relations, and the Heritage Foundation, there are ground reports from various defense attachés posted at embassies in Pyongyang and psychological analysis of the North Korean leader. Continue reading →

In a rare public announcement, Britain’s signals intelligence agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), issued a rare public statement concerning a charge by an American former judge that it conducted electronic surveillance of president-elect Donald Trump after his upset victory on November 8, 2016. GCHQ stated: “Recent allegations made by media commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to conduct ‘wiretapping’ against the then president-elect are nonsense. They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.” Its public announcement belied the fact that GCHQ and its four Five Eyes partners have spied on each other’s citizens as a legal “work around” to their national laws designed to prevent such domestic eavesdropping on citizens by their respective agencies. Continue reading →

Fake air travel security threats have joined the current fake news fad. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Transportation Security Administration, as well as their British counterparts, have announced a ban on laptop computers, tablets, cameras, Kindles and other e-readers, DVD players, and game consoles in carry-on baggage on the flights of certain airlines originating from or destined to a series of predominantly Muslim nations. Passengers flying from the designated airports are required to pack laptops and tablets in their check luggage. The decision has resulted in criticism from technical experts in the fields of communications, information technology, and improvised explosive devices or IEDs. Unlike the American ban, the British ban on carry-on items includes certain types of cell phones. Continue reading →

After their initial meeting in the Oval Office after the November 8 election, the then President-elect Trump told President Obama that he would welcome the president’s counsel in the future. That promise did not last long. Instead, Trump took to Fox News’s “Fox and Friends” to denounce Obama for being behind a shadowy conspiracy to place angry protesters within the audiences at Republican congressional lawmakers’ town hall meetings. Continue reading →

Foreign and national defense ministries around the world, as well as embassies in Washington, DC, are struggling to ascertain who is actually in charge of the U.S. government one month after Donald Trump was sworn in as president of the United States. It is a fair question, considering the conflicting statements issuing forth from the White House, State Department, and the Pentagon. Continue reading →

If Donald Trump’s most avid anti-globalist supporters believe that their president is “draining the swamp” of their bitterest of foes, they might be surprised that recently Vice President Mike Pence and Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis were in the company at the annual Munich Security Conference of Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Trilateral Commission deputy chairman Michael Fuchs, and global political troublemaker George Soros. Continue reading →

A toxic combination of alt-right Breitbart writers and George W. Bush neocons are consolidating their control over the Trump administration as allegations concerning the president and his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, buffet the White House. Continue reading →

The Donald Trump administration and the Brexit severance of ties between the United Kingdom and the European Union have, in a matter of a little over a half year, changed the world from a post-Cold War “new world order” based on American supremacy to a global “disorder” of altered alliances on a multipolar geo-political chessboard. In many respects, the new global disorder has also placed in jeopardy various post-World War II contrivances, including NATO, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the Australia-New Zealand-United States (ANZUS) alliance. Continue reading →

President Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway’s fictitious account of an Islamist terrorist attack carried out by two Iraqi refugees in Bowling Green, Kentucky has an eerily similar historical parallel. On August 31, 1939, the eve of the outbreak of World War II, the Nazi German propaganda machine falsely claimed that Polish troops crossed the German frontier and attacked a German radio station in the town of Gleiwitz. Continue reading →

The much anticipated constitutional crisis many feared would come about under President Trump’s bombastic style of leadership took only one week into his administration to be realized. Trump’s Executive Order banning visitors, including U.S. permanent resident “green card” holders and those with valid U.S. visas, was one of the most poorly planned and implemented White House regulation in recent memory. Continue reading →

In the U.S. Senate, some votes have more impact than others. That was certainly the case with the January 23 Senate vote to confirm Representative Mike Pompeo (R-KS) as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Quite aside from President Trump’s embattled relationship with the CIA, Pompeo’s confirmation by the Senate is similar to the Senate’s passage of the Iraq War Resolution in 2002, legislation that gave President George W. Bush the green light to engage in a costly invasion and occupation of Iraq. Continue reading →

Although this editor never had the opportunity to sit down with John F. Kennedy Jr. in July 1999 to discuss his offer to a small group of journalists he decided to hire to investigate his father’s assassination—Kennedy died in a suspicious plane crash shortly before the interview was scheduled—there was a surprise opportunity to discuss the matters of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination with his son. Continue reading →