ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

To many, the anecdote described below will sound far-fetched, and logical minds may suspect that the Vietnam vet in the story created the “incident” himself. But as those who lived through that period may remember, representatives of the covert side of government did far worse — and often. Infiltration, intimidation, framing, and more were all part of the arsenal against the “disloyal.” No method was deemed too severe. Today, we may find ourselves in a comparable period. Incidents covered by WhoWhatWhysuch as the fiery death of journalist Michael Hastings and the open statements that Edward Snowden should be assassinated remind us to take nothing for granted. (To see our stories on these threats, please go here here , here, here, here, and here.) The essay below is by the father of “Deep Politics” analysis, Peter Dale Scott . It reminds us that, too often, it is not the wild-sounding that is the fiction — but the constant assurances that everything is a-ok, that our soci...

The Paris and Brussels attacks are blowback from what Islamic State terrorists see as betrayal by Western benefactors who thought using jihadists could bring “regime change” in Syria, says Pakistani analyst Nauman Sadiq. By Nauman Sadiq France under President Nicolas Sarkozy played a lead role in fomenting the insurgency against the Gaddafi regime in Libya in 2011, and Sarkozy’s successor, Francois Hollande, has been on the forefront of supporting the Sunni militants in Syria against the Alawite-Shi’a regime of Bashar al-Assad. This arrangement of an informal pact between the Western powers and the Sunni jihadists of the Middle East against the Shi’a-Iranian axis worked well – at least for the Western powers and the Sunni jihadists – up to August 2014, when Obama Administration made an about-face on its previous “regime change” policy in Syria and started conducting air strikes against one group of Sunni jihadists battling against the Assad regime, the Islamic State. Journalist James ...

Islamic State (IS, previously ISIS/ISIL) militants have reportedly used poisonous gas in an attack on a Syrian military airbase located in Deir Ez-zor, the largest city in the eastern part of the country, RIA Novosti cited a military source as saying. “The Daesh [derogatory Arabic name for IS] militants attacked the military airfield in Deir Ez-zor with shells containing a poisonous chemical substance. The defenders of the airbase have reported that a number of soldiers were choking,” the source said. This latest report adds weight to previous evidence implicating IS in using various forms of poisonous gas to attack targets. Kurdish deputies in the Turkish parliament have previously accused Turkey of supplying Islamic State and other jihadist groups inside Syria with chemical weapons to fight the Syrian government. In an interview with RT, a spokesman for the Kurdish YPG militia said that Turkey had provided a clear transit route for the chemical weapons that were deployed against th...