Media, Hardliners Play Up North Korean Nuclear “Deception” Claim

Just as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was about to leave for denuclearization negotiations in Pyongyang, a spate of media stories reported that North Korea is deceiving the Trump administration by seeking to hide some of its nuclear facilities. Those stories suggest an effort by some Trump administration officials, led by National Security Adviser John Bolton, to derail the US-North Korea negotiations by pressuring Trump and Pompeo to embrace the narrative that Kim Jong Un is deceiving the US. Before becoming national security adviser, Bolton had made no secret of his opposition to any...

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An Elite Coalition Emerges Against a Trump-Kim Agreement

An implicit coalition of corporate media, Democratic partisans and others loyal to the national security state are actively hostile to any agreement that would endanger the continuation of the 70-year-old Cold War between the United States and North Korea. The hostility toward Donald Trump on the part of both corporate media (except for Fox News) and the Democratic Party establishment is obviously a factor in the negative response to the summit. Trump’s dysfunctional persona, extremist domestic strategy and attacks on the press had already created a hyper-adversarial political atmosphere...

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Back to the future? Bolton, Trump and Iranian regime change

Now that the Trump administration has derailed the Iran nuclear deal, the old issue of regime change in Iran is back again. National Security Advisor John Bolton is obviously the chief regime-change advocate in the administration, and there is every reason to believe he has begun to push that policy with Donald Trump in his first month in the White House. Bolton was part of the powerful neoconservative faction of national security officials in the George W Bush administration that had a plan for supporting regime change in Iran, not much different from the one Bolton is reportedly pushing...

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The Untold Story of John Bolton’s Campaign for War With Iran

Everyone knows Bolton is a hawk. Less understood is how he labored in secret to drive Washington and Tehran apart. In my reporting on U.S.-Israeli policy, I have tracked numerous episodes in which the United States and/or Israel made moves that seemed to indicate preparations for war against Iran. Each time—in 2007, in 2008, and again in 2011—those moves, presented in corporate media as presaging attacks on Tehran, were actually bluffs aimed at putting pressure on the Iranian government. But the strong likelihood that Donald Trump will now choose John Bolton as his next national security...

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How the Pentagon Enlisted Trump to Continue Its Perpetual "War on Terror"

The speech by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on January 17 laying out a series of conditions that would make it possible to withdraw US troops from Syria confirmed what had already been revealed by the Pentagon itself: The Trump administration is planning to keep US troops in Syria indefinitely. Although it was not a comprehensive policy statement, the Tillerson speech completed a months-long process in which the Pentagon has succeeded in enlisting the Trump administration to sign on for a semi-permanent US military engagement in three countries with significant US troops contingents:...

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How the Pentagon Enlisted Trump to Continue Its Perpetual "War on Terror"

The speech by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on January 17 laying out a series of conditions that would make it possible to withdraw US troops from Syria confirmed what had already been revealed by the Pentagon itself: The Trump administration is planning to keep US troops in Syria indefinitely. Although it was not a comprehensive policy statement, the Tillerson speech completed a months-long process in which the Pentagon has succeeded in enlisting the Trump administration to sign on for a semi-permanent US military engagement in three countries with significant US troops contingents:...

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How the Pentagon Enlisted Trump to Continue Its Perpetual “War on Terror”

The speech by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on January 17 laying out a series of conditions that would make it possible to withdraw US troops from Syria confirmed what had already been revealed by the Pentagon itself: The Trump administration is planning to keep US troops in Syria indefinitely. Although it was not a comprehensive policy statement, the Tillerson speech completed a months-long process in which the Pentagon has succeeded in enlisting the Trump administration to sign on for a semi-permanent US military engagement in three countries with significant US troops contingents:...

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How Cheney and His Allies Created the North Korea Nuclear Missile Crisis

The Trump administration has been telling people for months that the crisis with North Korea is the result of North Korea's relentless pursuit of a nuclear threat to the US homeland and past North Korean cheating on diplomatic agreements. However, North Korea reached agreements with both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations that could have averted that threat, had they been completed. Instead, a group of Bush administration officials led by then-Vice President Dick Cheney sabotaged both agreements, and Pyongyang went on to make rapid strides on both nuclear and missile development,...

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Gareth Porter

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.


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