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Most sentient people rationally accept that the U.S. media routinely disseminates misleading stories and outright falsehoods in the most authoritative tones. But it’s nonetheless valuable to examine particularly egregious case studies to see how that works. In that spirit, let’s take yesterday’s numerous, breathless reports trumpeting the “BREAKING” news that “Edward Snowden now wants to come home!” and is “now negotiating the terms of his return!” Ever since Snowden revealed himself to the public 20 months ago, he has repeatedly said the same exact thing when asked about his returning to the U.S.: I would love to come home, and would do so if I could get a fair trial, but right now, I can’t. His primary rationale for this argument has long been that under the Espionage Act, the 1917 statute under which he has been charged, he would be barred by U.S. courts from even raising his key defense: that the information he revealed to journalists should never have been concealed in the first place and he was thus justified in disclosing it to journalists. In other words, when U.S. political and media figures say Snowden should “man up,” come home and argue to a court that he did nothing wrong, they are deceiving the public, since they have made certain that whistleblowers charged with “espionage” are legally barred from even raising that defense.

Snowden has also pointed out that legal protections for whistleblowers are explicitly inapplicable to those, like him, who are employed by private contractors (rendering President Obama’s argument about why Snowden should “come home” entirely false). One month after Snowden was revealed, Daniel Ellsberg wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post arguing that Snowden did the right thing in leaving the U.S. because he would not be treated fairly, and argued Snowden should not return until he is guaranteed a fully fair trial. Snowden has said all of this over and over. In June 2013, when I asked him during the online Guardian chat why he left the U.S. for Hong Kong, he said: “the US Government, just as they did with other whistleblowers, immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home . . . That’s not justice, and it would be foolish to volunteer yourself to it if you can do more good outside of prison than in it.” In January 2014, AP reported about a new online chat Snowden gave: “Snowden said returning would be the best resolution. But Snowden said he can’t return because he wouldn’t be allowed to argue at trial that he acted in the public interest when he revealed the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs.” In that chat, he said: “Returning to the US, I think, is the best resolution for the government, the public, and myself.”

Gingrich: “I think if we can find a way to get him home, get the rest of the documents that he has not leaked . . . it’s worth doing, but I think he’d have to serve jail time, and it’d probably be fairly lengthy. I don’t think the country would tolerate this level of betrayal, not having some very significant jail time — Blitzer: “You say lengthy. What do you think? Gingrich: “I’m not an expert in this, but I’d say more than 10 years.” Where to start? First, Gingrich’s belief that it’s possible to “get the rest of the documents that he has not leaked” is simply adorable. Second, Gingrich is a fascinating choice for CNN to have pontificate on proper punishments given that he is the first House Speaker to ever be punished for ethics violations, for which he was fined $300,000. Third, David Petraeus was just allowed to plead guilty for leaking extremely sensitive secrets — not out of a whistleblowing desire to inform the public but simply to satisfy his mistress — and will almost certainly spend no time in jail; Gingrich, Blitzer, Ignatius and friends would never dare suggest that the General should go to prison (just as DC’s stern law-and-order advocates who demand Snowden’s imprisonment would never dare suggest the same for James Clapper for having lied to Congress).

Israel has banned Norwegian doctor and human rights activist Mads Gilbert from entering Gaza for life. Gilbert, a professor at the University Hospital of North Norway, where he has worked since 1976, earned international renown for his philanthropic work in late 2008, during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, an attack that, according to Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, killed roughly 1,400 Gazans, including almost 800 civilians, 350 of whom were children. The aid worker, along with fellow Norwegian doctor Erik Fosse, decided to volunteer in Gaza as soon as he heard that bombing had started, on 27 December 2008. Thanks to diplomatic and economic support (in the sum of $1 million dollar of emergency funding from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs), the two physicians managed to arrive in the strip by 30 December.

The Israeli government prevented all international press from entering Gaza during Cast Lead (a documentary, The War Around Us, was made about the only two foreign reporters in the strip at the time), in what Gilbert called Israel’s insidious “PR plan.” The doctor, as one of the only international aid workers in Gaza, thus devoted considerable time to speaking with local Palestinian news outlets, some of whom were reporting on behalf of foreign networks including BBC, CNN, ABC, and Al Jazeera. BBC aired an interview with Gilbert, conducted in the hospital. The questions asked, and the answers garnered, were eerily similar to those he would give just five years later, during Operation Protective Edge. The interviewer began asking him to respond to Israel’s claims that it was not targeting civilians, that it was only attacking Hamas militants. Gilbert called the claim “an absolutely stupid statement” and explained that, among the hundreds of patients he had seen at that point, only two had been fighters. The “large majority” were women, children, and men civilians. “These numbers are contradictory to everything Israel says,” he reported.

The doctor directed one heart-wrenching passage to President Obama, writing “Mr Obama – do you have a heart? I invite you – spend one night – just one night – with us in Shifa. I am convinced, 100 per cent, it would change history. Nobody with a heart and power could ever walk away from a night in Shifa without being determined to end the slaughter of the Palestinian people.” Israel later attacked Shifa hospital. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) “strongly condemn[ed]” the incursion, saying it “demonstrate[d] how civilians in Gaza have nowhere safe to go.” MSF director Marie-Noëlle Rodrigue stated, in an official statement, “When the Israeli army orders civilians to evacuate their houses and their neighborhoods, where is there for them to go? Gazans have no freedom of movement and cannot take refuge outside Gaza. They are effectively trapped.” Shifa was one of the over 10 medical facilities Israel bombed in its 50-day offensive.

The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) has submitted a report to the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor debunking Israeli claims that last summer’s attack on Gaza was an act of “self-defense.” Since the court began a preliminary examination into the events in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip beginning from 13 June 2014, Israel has attempted to ward off a full investigation by claiming that its 51-day assault on Gaza was an act of defense. NLG, a US human and civil rights organization, also sent its report to US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, who have suggested Israel’s right to defend itself justified the air bombardment and ground assault that left more than 2,200 people, the vast majority civilians, dead.

n their cover letter to the ICC and the White House, NLG notes that numerous respected sources have alleged war crimes, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations Human Rights Council and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.  “The central message that Israeli forces were protecting Israeli citizens from Hamas rockets was so ubiquitous in the Western media as to eclipse war crimes allegations,” said report author and Vermont attorney James Marc Leas. “But the facts and law do not support the self-defense claims.”

A Channel 10 news report Saturday indicated that some 60 Democratic legislators were expected to stay away from the address.

Officials in this administration have a funny way of blaming the victim. Did the CIA spy on Senate intelligence committee staffers who were investigating the agency’s torture program? No. OK, yes, you caught us — but the staffers were poking their nose into the CIA’s business. Are communities in some cities suffering from an uptick in crime rates? That must be because they were critical of police practices, and so the police are afraid to do their job. Are American Muslims disproportionately singled out for law enforcement scrutiny? It wouldn’t be necessary if they did a better job of identifying and rooting out the terrorists in their midst. Did a drone strike kill a 16-year-old boy who wasn’t on any target list but happened to be the son of alleged al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Aulaqi? I guess he “should have had a more responsible father,” as then-White House press secretary Robert Gibbs helpfully explained. At the annual conference of the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on National Security Law, officials were at it again. Both the CIA’s General Counsel, Caroline Krass, and the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), Karl Thompson, observed that agencies are issuing fewer requests for formal OLC opinions and are seeking “informal,” unwritten advice from OLC instead. This trend undermines the public’s ability to obtain OLC opinions through FOIA requests. And, according to Krass, we have no one to blame but ourselves:

I do think one reason is a focus the office has gotten [in] the past 10 years or so in the public which has now led to Freedom of Information Act requests pretty much anytime the administration adopts a position in the context of domestic law or national security that could be [or] seems a little bit edgy or slightly controversial, immediately the request for the OLC opinion comes. What were we thinking? Well, we might have had in mind OLC officials’ own acknowledgment that their opinions constitute the working law of the executive branch, and are binding on agencies in the same manner that a court’s decision would be. When the public expresses interest in a controversial court opinion, that isn’t cited as a reason to move the judicial system into the shadows. To the contrary, it’s well-understood that the public has a right to know how judges are interpreting the law. That’s true regardless of whether the law deals with the rights and obligations of private parties or (as is usually the case with OLC opinions) the authorities of the government.  It’s high time we stop pretending that OLC opinions are merely attorneys’ advice, and thereby entitled to confidentiality. A private person is free to accept or reject her attorney’s advice. By contrast, as Thompson recognized, OLC opinions — even informal, unwritten ones — are “binding by custom and practice . … People are supposed to and do follow [them].” Moreover, in ordinary circumstances, it is no defense to criminal charges that the defendant’s lawyer gave bad advice. OLC opinions, on the other hand, confer effective immunity, as the Justice Department will not prosecute any official who acted in reliance on OLC’s conclusions.

The government nonetheless argues, and many courts have agreed, that OLC opinions are exempt from disclosure under FOIA because they are “deliberative” and “pre-decisional.” This assessment conflates two distinct decisions: the decision of an agency whether to adopt a course of conduct, and OLC’s decision regarding how to interpret the law. The latter decision may be one factor — along with other, non-legal factors, such as political viability, financial cost, and the existence of competing priorities — in the agency’s “deliberations” on the former. The agency ultimately must decide whether to move forward with a policy. But on the question of how the law should be interpreted, it is OLC, not the agency, which has the final word. If the agency were to issue a different legal interpretation, there is no question that OLC’s would take precedence, and the agency would be courting legal jeopardy by adopting a course of action in tension with OLC’s reading of the law. Perhaps the solution is simply to require the government to abide by its own characterization. If OLC opinions are to be given the status of deliberative documents and/or legal advice, so be it; but in that case, they cannot be binding on any agency or official, nor can they mitigate any official’s criminal or civil liability (unless they genuinely negate a required state of mind). If, on the other hand, the government wishes to treat OLC opinions as authoritative and a shield against prosecution or civil suit, then they must be called what they are — law — and made available to the public. Until that happens, the public will remain a victim of secret law, and there will be no one but the administration to blame.

A top Army commander on Monday ordered that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl face a court-martial on charges of desertion and endangering troops stemming from his decision to leave his outpost in 2009, a move that prompted a huge manhunt in the wilds of eastern Afghanistan and landed him in nearly five years of harsh Taliban captivity. The decision by Gen. Robert B. Abrams, head of Army Forces Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., means that Sergeant Bergdahl, 29, faces a possible life sentence. That is a far more serious penalty than had been recommended by the Army’s investigating officer, who testified at the sergeant’s preliminary hearing in September that prison would be “inappropriate.”

According to Sergeant Bergdahl’s defense lawyers, the Army lawyer who presided over the preliminary hearing also recommended that he face neither jail time nor a punitive discharge and that he go before an intermediate tribunal known as a “special court-martial,” where the most severe penalty possible would be a year of confinement.

Monday’s decision rejecting that recommendation means that Sergeant Bergdahl now faces a maximum five-year penalty if ultimately convicted by a military jury of desertion, as well as potential life imprisonment on the more serious charge of misbehavior before the enemy, which in this case means endangering the troops who were sent to search for him after he disappeared.Sergeant Bergdahl has been the focus of attacks by Republicans in Congress and on the presidential campaign, and it is far from clear that General Abrams’s decision will temper their criticisms.Donald J. Trump, for one, has called the sergeant a “traitor” who should be executed, while Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, has vowed to hold hearings if the sergeant is not punished.

The U.S. State Department says it is “troubled” by Russia’s decision to ban two of liberal billionaire George Soros' pro-democracy charities and label the organizations a threat to national security. “Today’s designation of the Open Society Foundations and the Open Society Institute Assistance Foundation as so-called ‘undesirable’ organizations will only further restrict the work of civil society in Russia for the benefit of the Russian people,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Monday. “This action is yet another example of the Russian Government’s growing crackdown on independent voices and a deliberate step to further isolate the Russian people from the world.” A spokesperson from Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office said the activities of the fund are threats to state security and the Russian constitution, Radio Free Europe reports. The Open Society Foundations said in a statement on its website that it was “dismayed” by the decision.

Prosecutors started investigating the charity fund in July after Russian senators flagged a list of 12 groups that required a closer look over their supposed anti-Russian activities, RT reports. Other groups on the list include the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the MacArthur Foundation and Freedom House. Once a group in Russia is recognized as “undesirable,” its assets in the country must be frozen, its offices closed and the distribution of any of its materials is outlawed, RT reports. Violators of the ban could face heavy fines and jail time.

Brazilians have become inured to seeing politicians and businessmen marched off to prison for corruption. But the mug shot of banker André Esteves—unshaven and frowning—that flashed across TV screens in early December was a shock. Part of a cadre of mavericks who got astonishingly rich from Brazil’s transformation into one of the world’s top 10 economies in the 2000s, Esteves helped turn Grupo BTG Pactual into Latin America’s biggest standalone investment bank. Supremely confident, Esteves—who was a billionaire by his mid-30s—liked to quip that the initials in his company’s name stood for “Better than Goldman.”Around dawn on Nov. 25, Esteves’s fortunes soured in an instant. Police showed up at his apartment, which faces Rio de Janeiro’s legendary Ipanema beach, and hauled him away on allegations of obstructing a federal investigation into a massive pay-to-play scheme centered on Brazil’s state-run oil giant, Petrobras. Now Esteves, 47, resides in a cell block with concrete beds and communal toilets at Bangu, a high-security prison in Rio better known for housing drug traffickers and murderers.

Having its founder, chief executive officer, and chairman behind bars has pushed BTG Pactual to the brink of insolvency as clients pull their money out. Within days of his arrest, Esteves had relinquished his controlling stake in the firm, and his partners had begun a wholesale selloff of assets. To avert disaster, Brazil’s central bank helped engineer a $1.6 billion rescue line from the country’s privately funded deposit guarantee fund. Still, the bank’s shares have lost half their value since Esteves’s arrest. On Dec. 7, prosecutors formally accused the banker of obstruction of justice. Antônio Carlos de Almeida Castro, Esteves’s lawyer, says his client has done nothing wrong.The metastatic graft scandal that sent Esteves to jail threatens more than the survival of BTG. So many legislators are implicated, Congress has been unable to pass legislation to contain an exploding budget deficit. President Dilma Rousseff has grown so unpopular that lawmakers are maneuvering to impeach her for allegedly cooking the government’s books. Meanwhile, the economy is sliding into what Goldman Sachs calls a full-blown depression.

BTG’s collapse won’t cause Brazil’s capital markets to seize up as Lehman Brothers’ failure did in the U.S. in 2008. Yet having one of the country’s most prominent financiers behind bars is a body blow to the confidence of investors at a time when Brazil needs their cash. “It very much gives you the impression that the corruption scheme is so widespread that it induces a kind of counterparty risk,” says Monica de Bolle, a former International Monetary Fund economist. “You enter into transactions with people in Brazil without knowing whether or not they might be implicated in something.” The result: “Nothing gets done. There’s no business,” she says.

Tony Blair went to war in Iraq despite a report by South African experts with unique knowledge of the country that showed it did not possess weapons of mass destruction, according to a book published on Sunday.

God, Spies and Lies, by South African journalist John Matisonn, describes how then president Thabo Mbeki tried in vain to convince both Blair and President George W Bush that toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003 would be a terrible mistake. Mbeki’s predecessor, Nelson Mandela, also tried to convince the American leader, but was left fuming that “President Bush doesn’t know how to think”. The claim was this week supported by Mbeki’s office, which confirmed that he pleaded with both leaders to heed the WMD experts and even offered to become their intermediary with Saddam in a bid to maintain peace. South Africa had a special insight into Iraq’s potential for WMD because the apartheid government’s own biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programme in the 1980s led the countries to collaborate. The programme was abandoned after the end of white minority rule in 1994 but the expert team, known as Project Coast, was put back together by Mbeki to investigate the US and UK assertion that Saddam had WMD – the central premise for mounting an invasion.

Mbeki, who enjoyed positive relations with both Blair and Saddam, asked for the team to be granted access. “Saddam agreed, and gave the South African team the freedom to roam unfettered throughout Iraq,” writes Matisonn, who says he drew on sources in Whitehall and the South African cabinet. “They had access to UN intelligence on possible WMD sites. The US, UK and UN were kept informed of the mission and its progress.” The experts put their prior knowledge of the facilities to good use, Matisonn writes. “They already knew the terrain, because they had travelled there as welcome guests of Saddam when both countries were building WMD.” On their return, they reported that there were no WMDs in Iraq. “They knew where the sites in Iraq had been, and what they needed to look like. But there were now none in Iraq.”

A few weeks before the last great international climate conference—2009, in Copenhagen—the e-mail accounts of a few climate scientists were hacked and reviewed for incriminating evidence suggesting that global warming was a charade. Eight separate investigations later concluded that there was literally nothing to “Climategate,” save a few sentences taken completely out of context—but by that time, endless, breathless media accounts about the “scandal” had damaged the prospects for any progress at the conference. Ad Policy Now, on the eve of the next global gathering in Paris this December, there’s a new scandal. But this one doesn’t come from an anonymous hacker taking a few sentences out of context. This one comes from months of careful reporting by two separate teams, one at the Pulitzer Prize–winning website Inside Climate News, and the other at the Los Angeles Times (with an assist from the Columbia Journalism School). Following separate lines of evidence and document trails, they’ve reached the same bombshell conclusion: ExxonMobil, the world’s largest and most powerful oil company, knew everything there was to know about climate change by the mid-1980s, and then spent the next few decades systematically funding climate denial and lying about the state of the science.

Council of Foreign Relations resident skeptic Micah Zenko recently tallied up how many bombs the United States has dropped on other countries and the results are as depressing as one would think. Zenko figured that since Jan. 1, 2015, the U.S. has dropped around 23,144 bombs on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, all countries that are majority Muslim. The chart, provided by the generally pro-State Department think tank, puts in stark terms how much destruction the U.S. has leveled on other countries. Whether or not one thinks such bombing is justified, it’s a blunt illustration of how much raw damage the United States inflicts on the Muslim world:

It does not appear to be working either. Despite the fact that the U.S. dropped 947 bombs in Afghanistan in 2015, a recent analysis in Foreign Policy magazine found that the Taliban control more territory in Afghanistan than at any point since 2001. The U.S. has entered its 16th year of war in Afghanistan despite several promises by the Obama administration to withdraw. In October of last year, President Obama reversed his position and decided to keep American troops in Afghanistan until the end of 2017. The last four U.S. presidents have bombed Iraq, and that includes the current one since airstrikes were launched on Aug. 7, 2014. The war against ISIS was originally framed as a “limited,” “humanitarian“ intervention. Since then, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has insisted it will be a “30-year war” and the White House has spoken vaguely of a “long-term effort” in both Iraq and Syria. Another red flag Zenko noted was the complete lack of civilian deaths being tallied as a result of those 23,144 bombs. Remarkably, they also claim that alongside the 25,000 fighters killed, only 6 civilians have “likely” been killed in the seventeen-month air campaign. At the same time, officials admit that the size of the group has remained wholly unchanged. In 2014, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimated the size of the Islamic State to be between 20,000 and 31,000 fighters, while on Wednesday, Warren again repeated the 30,000 estimate. To summarize the anti-Islamic State bombing calculus: 30,000 – 25,000 = 30,000.

So after more than 20,000 bombs, the U.S. Defense Department only cops to the deaths of six civilians. This is a position largely accepted by the media, which rarely asks who is actually being extinguished by the airstrikes in Syria and Iraq. In October, 30 civilians died after the U.S. bombed a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The incident is still being investigated, but it has already been revealed that many elements of the original story were either false or deliberately misleading.

Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce “detailed spreadsheets” of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president, according to former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova. “What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,” diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday. “The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,” diGenova said. “In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.”

Other official sources with direct knowledge and who requested anonymity confirmed to TheDCNF diGenova’s description of surveillance reports Rice ordered one year before the 2016 presidential election. Also on Monday, Fox News and Bloomberg News, citing multiple sources reported that Rice had requested the intelligence information that was produced in a highly organized operation. Fox said the unmasked names of Trump aides were given to officials at the National Security Council (NSC), the Department of Defense, James Clapper, President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, and John Brennan, Obama’s CIA Director. Joining Rice in the alleged White House operations was her deputy Ben Rhodes, according to Fox. Critics of the atmosphere prevailing throughout the Obama administration’s last year in office point to former Obama Deputy Defense Secretary Evelyn Farkas who admitted in a March 2 television interview on MSNBC that she “was urging my former colleagues,” to “get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration.”

Michael Doran, former NSC senior director, told TheDCNF Monday that “somebody blew a hole in the wall between national security secrets and partisan politics.” This “was a stream of information that was supposed to be hermetically sealed from politics and the Obama administration found a way to blow a hole in that wall,” he said.

In its last months the Obama administration ordered the intelligence agencies to collect and distribute information of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. This to prevent any change by the Trump administration of the hostile policy towards Russia that the Obama administration instituted. The intent was also to give the intelligence services blackmail material against the Trump crew to prevent any changes in their undue, freewheeling independence. The above is reported in a little discussed New York Times piece published yesterday. The reporting angle captured in the headline is biased to set the Obama efforts into a positive light: Obama Administration Rushed to Preserve Intelligence of Russian Election Hacking.

Make no mistake by straight-reading that headline. Not single shred of evidence has been provided that "Russia hacked the election" or had anything to do with various leaks of Clinton related emails. A lot of fluff and chaff was thrown around but not even one tiny bit of evidence. The Obama effort was clearly to sabotage the announced policy of the incoming administration of seeking better relations with Russia. Obama intended to undermine the will of the voters by abusing instruments of the state. Excerpts from the piece: In the Obama administration’s last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about  ... possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump and Russians — across the government. Former American officials say they had two aims: to ensure that such meddling isn’t duplicated in future American or European elections, and to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators.

After years of deriding the U.S. war in Afghanistan as “complete waste”, U.S. President Donald Trump trumped his previous position and election promises on Monday, when he said he now believes it is in the United States’ interest to remain committed to Afghanistan. 

In an evening address from a military base outside Washington, U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled his administrations new policy without unveiling many details of it. Trump said his policy was base on a “condition-based” approach to defeating terrorism in the country and said the United States will no longer use its military to construct democracies or rebuild other countries in its own image. His goal, he said, is to stop the re-emergence of safe havens for terrorists to threaten America and make sure they do not get their hands on nuclear weapons. “We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities,” Trump told about 2,000 service members at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall. “Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables will guide our strategy from now on. America’s enemies must never know our plans or believe they can wait us out. I will not say when we are going to attack, but attack we will.” Trump has reportedly approved up to 4,000 more U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Currently, there are about 8,400 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Most are advising Afghan forces, though some are tasked with carrying out counterterrorism operations against groups such as the Taliban or the Islamic State’s Afghan affiliate. That number is down significantly from the height of former President Barack Obama’s troop surge, which saw nearly 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan in August 2010. However, there has also been a significant resurgence of the Taliban and ISIS has entered the Afghan theater since.

Following Trump’s speech, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson released a statement saying: “We stand ready to support peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban without preconditions. We look to the international community, particularly Afghanistan’s neighbors, to join us in supporting an Afghan peace process.” Trump, in his address, put Pakistan on notice. “We have been paying Pakistan billions and billions of dollars at the same time they are housing the very terrorists they are fighting. But that will have to change and that will change immediately,” Trump said. Many perceived Trumps statement to “not allowing terrorists to acquire nuclear weapons” as a reference to Pakistan as well. The conflict in Afghanistan, a country with a factionalized unity government, with former war lords holding key government positions, and riddled with systemic corruption,  has dragged on for 16 years. It is becoming the longest U.S. war ever, since the September 11, 2001 “incidents” in the United States. It is worth noting that a growing number of U.S. Americans no longer believe in the “official narrative” about the events on 9/11 and would like to see an independent investigation. Expressing frustration Trump informed Afghanistan that the commitment by the United States is not unlimited and America’s support not a blank check. The American people, he warned, expect “to see real reforms and real results.” Trump’s policy announcement follows a months long review. However, there are many Afghan politicians including former President Hamid Karzai who are opposed to an increase in troops and who call for a political settlement instead.