Favorite The confirmation hearing for Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the CIA, Gina Haspel, will begin in the U.S. Senate on Wednesday. Haspel’s nomination has become controversial because of her supervision of a CIA black site in Thailand, where detainees were tortured (with heinous methods that extended far beyond “mere” waterboarding), as well as her central role in destroying…
All posts tagged Donald Trump
Intercepted Podcast: A Nation Addicted to War
Favorite Subscribe to the Intercepted podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Radio Public, and other platforms. New to podcasting? Click here. The bipartisan war party is once again giddy with excitement as Trump prepares to become “presidential” again. This week on Intercepted: U.N. inspectors have not even arrived on the ground in Syria…
What’s Worse: Trump’s Campaign Agenda or Empowering Generals and CIA Operatives to Subvert it?
Favorite During his successful 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump, for better and for worse, advocated a slew of policies that attacked the most sacred prongs of long-standing bipartisan Washington consensus. As a result, he was (and continues to be) viewed as uniquely repellent by the neoliberal and neoconservative guardians of that consensus, along with their sprawling network of…
Trump Threatens Comey With Secretly Recorded “Tapes” of Their Conversations
Favorite Updated: 5:10 p.m. EDT Here’s your morning Impeachment Watch: The president of the United States, @realDonaldTrump, just publicly threatened to release secretly recorded tapes of his conversations with James Comey, the former FBI director he fired this week. James Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to…
Russia’s Top Diplomat Enjoyed His Oval Office Visit, and Has the Photographs to Prove It
Favorite Last Updated: Thursday, 11:04 a.m. EDT Russian officials, at least, seem to be enjoying the turmoil that’s engulfed Washington since last night, when President Donald Trump abruptly fired FBI Director James Comey, to derail his investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The first hint of that came when the country’s…
Trump’s Support and Praise of Despots Is Central to the U.S. Tradition, Not a Deviation From It
Favorite Since at least the end of World War II, supporting the world’s worst despots has been a central plank of U.S. foreign policy, arguably its defining attribute. The list of U.S.-supported tyrants is too long to count, but the strategic rationale has been consistent: In a world where anti-American sentiment is prevalent, democracy often…
The Spoils of War: Trump Lavished With Media and Bipartisan Praise For Bombing Syria
Favorite In every type of government, nothing unites people behind the leader more quickly, reflexively or reliably than war. Donald Trump now sees how true that is, as the same establishment leaders in U.S. politics and media who have spent months denouncing him as a mentally unstable and inept authoritarian and unprecedented threat to democracy are standing and applauding…
Trump’s War on Terror Has Quickly Become as Barbaric and Savage as He Promised
Favorite From the start of his presidency, Donald Trump’s “war on terror” has entailed the seemingly indiscriminate slaughter of innocent people in the name of killing terrorists. In other words, Trump has escalated the 16-year-old core premise of America’s foreign policy — that it has the right to bomb any country in the world where…
Trump’s Use of Navy SEAL’s Wife Highlights All the Key Ingredients of U.S. War Propaganda
Favorite During his Tuesday night address to the U.S. Congress, President Trump paid tribute to Ryan Owens, the Navy SEAL killed in the January commando raid in Yemen that Trump ordered. As he did so, television cameras focused for almost four full minutes on Owens’s grieving wife, Carryn, as she wept and applauded while sitting next…
Fox News Interview With Fake Expert on Sweden Further Baffles Swedes
Favorite A man interviewed by Bill O’Reilly of Fox News this week, who was identified in an on-screen caption as a “Swedish Defense and National Security Advisor,” turns out to be entirely unknown in his native country, with no connections to either the nation’s defense or security services. As the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported…