Free Republic

Putin and the Neoconservatives By William Pfaff Comment by Julio Severo: This article was kindly sent and recommended to me by a Pentecostal minister in the U.S. Its author, William Pfaff, said, “The resemblance of President Putin’s ambitions for his Russia to those of the neoconservatives in the contemporary United States bear a striking formal resemblance in the wish of both to recall a romanticized past.” For pro-family Christians, the important point is whether a president supports a pro-family agenda or anti-family agenda. We supported George W. Bush because of his generally pro-life stances, even though his neocon decision...

Aloof. Polite. Cajoling. Extremely attentive. Restrained. Dishonest. Inscrutable. Malicious. The rebels from northern Syria, remembering encounters with him months later, recall completely different facets of the man. But they agree on one thing: "We never knew exactly who we were sitting across from." In fact, not even those who shot and killed him after a brief firefight in the town of Tal Rifaat on a January morning in 2014 knew the true identity of the tall man in his late fifties. They were unaware that they had killed the strategic head of the group calling itself "Islamic State" (IS). The...

In the Assad regime's heartland, dead officers are sent home in ambulances, while the corpses of ordinary soldiers are returned in undecorated pick-up trucks. Then come the press gangs: military recruiters raid houses to find replacements by force for the dwindling ranks of Syria's military. Sharing their sect with President Bashar al-Assad, Alawites have long been the core constituency for the Syrian regime. As the civil war drags into its fifth year, the minority sect is seen by opposition rebels as remaining unwaveringly loyal.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah recently slammed those criticizing him, saying: "Anyone who says anything contrary to what is said here is a moron, is blind, and a traitor. The Shi'ites of the American embassy are traitors, agents, and morons. No one can alter our convictions. We won't be silent anymore and we will no longer humor anyone." However, this time Nasrallah's angry and threatening statements were not directed against his usual rivals. They are directed against Shi'ites in Lebanon. These statements reveal the extent of such disputes and expose the increasing criticisms against him, after a prolonged Syrian war and...

Many of his foreign fighters come from Afghanistan -- men like Murad, who is now being held in Aleppo as a prisoner-of-war... All he had wanted was an Iranian residence permit, he says... he found himself fighting as a mercenary in the Syrian civil war on the side of the Bashar Assad regime... When a violent explosion caused the house he was in to collapse, he found himself thinking about his daughters, he says. "I screamed and thought I was suffocating. And then, everything around me was quiet." Men arrived and pulled Murad, who was still screaming, out of the...

A Syrian brigadier-general was killed in a blast that targeted his car in downtown Damascus on Sunday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said. The Britain-based group said "a brigadier general and approximately six people with him were killed in an explosion in the Adawi neighborhood in the center of the capital." The powerful Ahrar al-Sham rebel group posted a video online claiming to show the attack on Brigadier-General Bassem Ali Muhanna's car with an improvised explosive device, in the early hours of Sunday. A security source said Muhanna was a member of the Republican Guards, an elite unit...

Weakened by years of war, Syria's government appears ready for the country's de facto partition, defending strategically important areas and leaving much of the country to rebels and jihadists, experts and diplomats say. The strategy was in evidence last week with the army's retreat from the ancient central city of Palmyra after an advance by the Islamic State group (ISIS or IS)... Syria's regime labels all those fighting to oust President Bashar al-Assad "terrorists," and has pointed to the emergence of ISIS and Al-Nusra as evidence that opponents of the regime are extremists. Since the uprising against Assad began in...

In an episode of Truth in Media, Ben Swann investigates the origins of the militant group referred to as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and lays blame for the terrorist organization on the United State government.CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO “The name ISIS is one that every American knows,” said Swann, an independent investigative journalist who earned two Emmy Awards and two Edward R. Murrow awards. “The biggest threat to our national security since Al-Qaeda, right? They are a brutal, savage group known for public beheadings and mass executions. They are the face of the new...

From the first sudden, and quite dramatic, appearance of the fanatical Islamic group known as ISIS which was largely unheard of until a year ago, on the world's stage and which promptly replaced the worn out and tired al Qaeda as the world's terrorist bogeyman, we suggested that the "straight to beheading YouTube clip" purpose behind the Saudi Arabia-funded Islamic State was a simple one: use the Jihadists as the vehicle of choice to achieve a political goal: depose of Syria's president Assad, who for years has stood in the way of a critical Qatari natural gas pipeline, one which...

President Vladimir Putin signed a bill into law Saturday giving prosecutors the power to declare foreign and international organizations “undesirable” in Russia and shut them down. […] The law is part of a Kremlin campaign to stifle dissent that intensified after Putin began his third term in 2012. His return to the presidency had been accompanied by mass street protests that Putin accused the United States of fomenting. Russian suspicions of Western intentions have been further heightened because of tensions over Russia’s role in the conflict in Ukraine. The new Russian law allows prosecutors to declare an organization undesirable if...

From the first sudden, and quite dramatic, appearance of the fanatical Islamic group known as ISIS which was largely unheard of until a year ago, on the world's stage and which promptly replaced the worn out and tired al Qaeda as the world's terrorist bogeyman, we suggested that the "straight to beheading YouTube clip" purpose behind the Saudi Arabia-funded Islamic State was a simple one: use the Jihadists as the vehicle of choice to achieve a political goal: depose of Syria's president Assad, who for years has stood in the way of a critical Qatari natural gas pipeline, one which...

War, what's it good for? Aside from countless deaths of innocent civilians of course, it means a GDP boost for the biggest exporter of weapons on earth, the United States, and even more profits for the US military-industrial complex. Profits which mean the shareholders of America's arms manufacturers get even richer. Which is why following months of middle-eastern sabre ratling and numerous quasi-wars already raging in the region, moments ago the U.S. State Department approved the sale of 10 MH-60R Seahawk helicopters to Saudi Arabia for $1.9 billion, the first step in "a major multibillion-dollar modernization of the Saudi...

The country is on the cliff of bankruptcy. A spate of politically motivated killings and mysterious suicides of former government officials has sown fear in the capital. Infighting has begun to splinter the pro-European majority coalition in Parliament. And a constant threat of war lingers along the Russian border. A year after the election of Petro O. Poroshenko as president to replace the ousted Viktor F. Yanukovych, and six months after the swearing in of a new legislature, Ukraine remains deeply mired in political and economic chaos.

TBILISI, Georgia (AP) — About 600 U.S. and Georgian troops are conducting joint exercises aimed at training the armed forces of the former Soviet republic for participation in the NATO Response Force. Col. Michael Foster, commander of the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade, said the exercises are "an absolutely unique opportunity for us" and "the way we are going to be fighting in the future."

Nothing in the western media covered what the Turkish Anadulu Agency released, when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan gave a speech this Friday with a strange message riddled with statements that were predicted in the Bible regarding Antichrist. From his desire to invade Jerusalem and to Muhammad’s claim to have ascended to heaven from there, Erdogan called on all Turks to refocus on the Ottoman goal to re-conquer Jerusalem for Islam:  “Unfortunately we the Muslims lost our aim to head towards Jerusalem. The water of our eyes froze making us blind, and our hearts that was destined to beat...

Ted Cruz is intellectually arrogant, like Ronald Reagan. The difference is that Reagan masked his arrogance with self-deprecating humor. Sen. Cruz does a Reagan impression that would do a nightclub comedian proud, but he doesn’t have Reagan’s easy and spontaneous humor. One doesn’t think of Reagan as arrogant, but he was in fact the most arrogant leader we have had since Lincoln. He ignored the whole of the foreign policy establishment in his conviction that America stood to win the Cold War and bring down Communism. Then as now, the foreign policy establishment resembled Jonathan Swift’s scientists on the floating...

A senior aide to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Thursday accused Facebook of political bias, ahead of a question-and-answer session with co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. "There is pro-Russian influence and pressure on the Facebook office in Russia," said deputy head of the presidential administration Dmytro Shymkiv, who is negotiating with the global social network to solve the problem. He claimed Russian moderators are overseeing Ukrainian users and are swayed by the Kremlin's political agenda in the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Facebook users in Ukraine have flooded the social network with allegations of pro-Russian political bias. Poroshenko this week made a personal...

Even though Edward Snowden is in exile in Moscow, he's still hard at work — although he won't reveal what exactly he is working on quite yet because he believes in being judged on the results. Whatever he's working on, the former NSA contractor who exposed controversial US surveillance practices, says it's much tougher than his last gig. "The fact is I was getting paid an extraordinary amount of money for very little work with very little in the way of qualifications. That's changed significantly," Snowden said in an event at Stanford University on Friday, via teleconference from Moscow. "I...

Just under three years ago, Mohammed Morsi assumed office as Egypt’s first freely elected head of state, a milestone in the “Arab Spring” struggle for democracy. On Saturday, the same Egyptian state condemned him to die. A court in Cairo has sentenced the former president to death for conspiring with foreign militants during a prison escape in 2011. The ruling comes one month after Morsi received a separate 20-year sentence for inciting violence against protesters while in office. Egyptian authorities have detained Morsi since his overthrow in July 2013.

A US appeals court has ruled that the NSA's dragnet of millions of Americans' phone calls is illegal, and Edward Snowden served as the catalyst for the decision. "Americans first learned about the telephone metadata program that appellants now challenge on June 5, 2013, when the British newspaper The Guardian published a FISC order leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden," the court noted.