"If you were surprised to learn the U.S. has nearly a thousand troops in Niger, you’re not alone. Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who serves on the Armed Forces Committee, told NBC he 'had no idea.' Neither did Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s top Democrat. Well, the surprises may keep coming."
"In his tweet, Assange called out current and former senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman, respectively, for forcing him into seeking alternative sources of funding which turned out to be a blessing in disguise. At the time, Lieberman called for the Department of Justice to indict Assange under the 1917 Espionage Act and sought his extradition from the UK for leaking US Embassy cables."
"Trump’s decision to decertify the Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), appears to have fallen in line with the views espoused by several of his top donors. These funders believe that Iran poses an apocalyptic threat only addressable through military action, including the use of nuclear weapons."
"The investigation was supervised by then-U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, who is now President Trump’s Deputy Attorney General, and then-Assistant FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who is now the deputy FBI director under Trump. Rosenstein and Mueller also sat on the CFIUS committee that approved the sale of 20% of US uranium reserves to Russia despite knowing Russia had bribed the Clintons for the illicit sale."
"Emails as early as 2009 showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show. They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill."
"The 53 year old ran the hugely popular ‘Running Commentary’ blog which led Malta’s Panama Papers investigation and highlighted several other corruption scandals in the Mediterranean island nation. The blog's most recent revelations took aim at Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and two of his closest aides."
"It originated in the early 1990s when the neocons in the George HW Bush administration realized that with the Cold War's end, the Warfare State was in grave danger of massive demobilization like the US had done after every war until 1945. So among many other invented two-bit threats, the Iranian regime was demonized in order to keep the Imperial City in thrall to its purported national security threat and in support of the vast global armada of military forces, bases and occupations needed to contain it (including the Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf and US bases throughout the region)."
"The JFK Records Act, enacted in 1992 in response to public outrage over continued official secrecy in the JFK assassination, required the CIA and other federal agencies to release all their records relating to the JFK assassination. Someone, however, slipped a provision into the law entitling the CIA (and other federal agencies) to wait another 25 years to release their records. Taking advantage of that provision, the CIA withheld tens of thousands of pages of records, no doubt thinking that another 25 years was a long time away."
"Since the end of World War Two the Central Intelligence Agency has been a major force in US and foreign news media, exerting considerable influence over what the public sees, hears and reads on a regular basis. CIA publicists and journalists alike will assert they have few, if any, relationships, yet the seldom acknowledged history of their intimate collaboration indicates a far different story–indeed, one that media historians are reluctant to examine."
"The court’s verdict also directed authorities to seize the property and assets of Musharraf, now in self-imposed exile in Dubai, and to issue perpetual arrest warrants for the former dictator."