“It’s certainly true that Congress is charged with deciding whether or not to declare war. But the Congress has failed to live up to its responsibility as the U.S. is waging war in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Niger and elsewhere without a constitutionally mandated declaration of war. The U.S. government is also providing critical assistance to Saudi Arabia in what is effectively a genocidal war in Yemen.”

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“Joe Biden was not telling the truth when at the debate on Thursday he said that the Obama administration did not ‘lock people in cages’ or ‘separate families.’ The statement is an impossible one given the nearly 3 million deportations during the eight years of Obama, the most ever by a sitting president, among other things. With his denial what Biden tried to do was extract himself from a vicious border and immigration enforcement system that the Obama administration both bolstered and helped normalize.”

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Presidential candidate Joe Biden is now claiming about the 2003 Iraq invasion: “Yes, I did oppose the war before it began.”…Tracey also writes: “When I reminded Biden that if he opposed the war all along, he could have joined 23 of his Senate colleagues in voting against authorizing it, he replied: ‘No, no, because they argued against authorizing the ability to get the United Nations to go back in with inspectors. We needed the Security Council to get a vote to put inspectors in to determine whether or not there was any nuclear activity going on.'” This statement is wrong…

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“Of course, Bolton’s departure will naturally increase the influence of Pompeo, a Christian Zionist whose views on Middle East policy, in particular, are very close to hard-line neoconservatives, but hopefully the Pentagon can act as an effective counterweight.”

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The film is a remarkably accurate Hollywood account of how British spy Katharine Gun (played by Keira Knightley) attempted to stop the invasion of Iraq by exposing a top secret NSA document proving the U.S. and British governments were spying on other UN members to bully and blackmail their way to a UN authorization for war. Gun recently revealed that she was inspired to expose the Jan. 31, 2003 NSA document in part by reading a book co-authored by Norman Solomon about the then-impending invasion.

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“For more than four decades Afghans have suffered in a civil war that the United States has been integral in and responsible for. Prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1979 the U.S. started supplying revolutionary Islamic forces in Afghanistan to create chaos to force the Soviet Union to invade, ‘in order to give the Soviets their own Vietnam’ as President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski said. After the Soviet Union withdrew in 1989, the United States continued to send money and weapons to various Mujahedin groups for years, helping to create a more fragmented civil…

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“The Terrorist Watch List, used to keep some people from flying (the No-Fly List) as well as to harass as many as a million people not deemed threats to air safety, but considered somehow ‘linked’ to terrorism, was ruled unconstitutional. The judge found that the lists maintained by the FBI — both the No Fly List and the so-called ‘Selectee list’ and ‘Expanded Selectee list,’ are unconstitutionally vague about how and why people get placed on them, and also unconstitutional because there is ‘no credible way’ provided for people to challenge their being placed on those lists, i.e. no way…

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“Scott Ritter, the former chief U.N. weapons inspector, noted just prior to the hearings, ‘For Senator Biden’s Iraq hearings to be anything more than a political sham used to invoke a modern-day Gulf of Tonkin resolution-equivalent for Iraq, his committee will need to ask hard questions — and demand hard facts — concerning the real nature of the weapons threat posed by Iraq.’ …But Biden had no intention of doing so, refusing to even allow Ritter — who knew more about Iraq’s WMD capabilities than anyone and would have testified that Iraq had achieved at least qualitative disarmament — to…

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“As Danab [U.S. trained militia] and the United States make headway in Lower Shabelle, they have become the subject of more and more accusations of civilian casualties and arbitrary arrests. Mahat Dore, a member of Parliament based in Marka, a main town in Lower Shabelle, has recorded six incidents in which civilians were killed and property destroyed since April 4…Dore also shared photos of the flash bangs [explosive] made by the Pennsylvania-based company Combined Systems, which he collected from the villages. The police commissioner in Lower Shabelle knows what’s happening, Dore tells In These Times, but says the Somali government…

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“Miami dodged catastrophe in the form of Hurricane Irma two years ago. Fortunately, the city has now avoided the kind of tragedy that Dorian inflicted on the Bahamas. More such rolls of the dice are coming, but I would not expect Dorian to cool down Miami’s developers any more than Irma did. The fatalist logic of Miami’s real estate market works as long as you’re confident you can sell that condo to a greater fool at a nice profit sometime before one of these monster storms takes a bad turn toward Biscayne Bay.”

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