American Jewish billionaire Sheldon Adelson is reportedly set to give presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump a campaign donation that could exceed $100 million, making it the largest contribution the casino magnate would have given to a GOP candidate. According to two Republicans with direct knowledge of the commitment to Trump who spoke to the New York Times, Adelson has told Trump “that he was willing to contribute more to help elect him than he has to any previous campaign, a sum that could exceed $100 million.”
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2016-05-14
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2016-04-17
As its era of global dominance ends, the United States needs to take the lead in realigning the global power architecture.
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2016-04-01
On the morning of July 18, 1994, a bomb exploded in Buenos Aires, destroying the headquarters of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association, better known by its Spanish acronym, AMIA. The blast killed 85 people and injured more than 200 others in an incident that would become known as the deadliest anti-Semitic terrorist attack in Latin American history. Over the past two decades, a labyrinthine body of evidence has accumulated about the AMIA bombing. Yet, despite the emergence of several plausible theories of culpability, no one has ever conclusively proven the identity, much less the guilt, of any of the perpetrators.
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2016-02-23
They don’t hate ‘our freedoms.’ They hate that we’ve betrayed our ideals in their own countries — for oil. […) In part because my father was murdered by an Arab, I’ve made an effort to understand the impact of U.S. policy in the Mideast and particularly the factors that sometimes motivate bloodthirsty responses from the Islamic world against our country. As we focus on the rise of the Islamic State and search for the source of the savagery that took so many innocent lives in Paris and San Bernardino, we might want to look beyond the convenient explanations of religion and ideology. Instead we should examine the more complex rationales of history and oil — and how they often point the finger of blame back at our own shores.
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2016-01-07
Barack Obama’s repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office – and that there are ‘moderate’ rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him – has in recent years provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition, among some of the most senior officers on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. Their criticism has focused on what they see as the administration’s fixation on Assad’s primary ally, Vladimir Putin. In their view, Obama is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia and China, and hasn’t adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share Washington’s anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria; like Washington, they believe that Islamic State must be stopped.
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2015-12-01
… A nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East was first proposed in the UN General Assembly in 1974 by Iran and Egypt. In 1990, the proposal was broadened by Egypt to include a ban on chemical and biological weapons—that is, to create a WMD-free zone in the Middle East. A 1991 study commissioned by the UN secretary-general proposed that such a zone encompass “all States directly connected to current conflicts in the region, i.e., all States members of the League of Arab States…, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Israel.” As of late 2015, all of these countries but two—Israel and Syria—had sent letters to the UN secretary-general confirming their support for declaring the Middle East a region free from nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. …
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2015-09-14
With the US military having withdrawn many of its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, most Americans would be forgiven for being unaware that hundreds of US bases and hundreds of thousands of US troops still encircle the globe. Although few know it, the United States garrisons the planet unlike any country in history, and the evidence is on view from Honduras to Oman, Japan to Germany, Singapore to Djibouti.
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2015-09-01
The Khobar Towers bombing, which killed 19 US servicemen and wounded 372, is one of the events that US officials and news media routinely mention as proof of Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism. And in 2001 the Bush administration indicted Mughassil, along with twelve other members of “Hizballah Al-Hijaz,” the Saudi Shiite dissident organization aligned with Iran, for allegedly carrying out the Khobar bombing under direction from Iran. But an investigation of the Khobar Towers case that I conducted in 2009, based on interviews with more than a dozen former FBI, CIA and other administration officials knowledgeable about the official investigation, reveals a very different story: ...
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2015-08-06
In Al Jazeera’s latest Head to Head episode, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Michael Flynn confirms to Mehdi Hasan that not only had he studied the DIA memo predicting the West’s backing of an Islamic State in Syria when it came across his desk in 2012, but even asserts that the White House’s sponsoring of radical jihadists (that would emerge as ISIL and Nusra) against the Syrian regime was “a willful decision.”...
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2015-04-03
Yemen is the latest casualty of a neoconservative strategy commissioned by the US Army to ‘capitalise on Sunni-Shia conflict’ in the Middle East - the goal is nothing short of ‘Western dominance’. ...