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  By Jan Oberg and Michael Springman … which is what we do here on PressTV’s “The Debate” on July 10, 2018. See who U.S. diplomat, Michael Springman, is here on his homepage and here on Wikipedia.    

  By Jan Oberg and Michael Springman … which is what we do here on PressTV’s “The Debate” on July 10, 2018. See who U.S. diplomat, Michael Springman, is here on his homepage and here on Wikipedia.    

  Jan Oberg, Oberg PhotoGraphics, has been invited by the Global Art Affairs (GAA) Foundation and the European Cultural Center to exhibit at Palazzo Mora in Venice during the Biennale 2019. This exciting opportunity stimulated the development of a bigger idea that combines Oberg’s work for peace and art photography with a focus on the […]

June  26, 2018 Born in 1988, Danish; rhetorician, writer, poet, speaker and communication advisor. Jesper Munk Jakobsen became TFF Associate in June 2018. Jesper Munk Jakobsen has a Master of Arts in rhetoric from Aarhus University, Denmark, and a prof.bach in communication from the Danish School for Media and Journalism. From 2015-2017 he was communications […]

  By Jonathan Power Politics is a fickle beast. Barack Obama won more votes among blue-collar workers than did his opponent, Senator John McCain. But it was those very blue-collar workers who tipped the scales in Donald Trump’s victory. They weren’t racists or they wouldn’t have voted for Obama in the first place. But in voting for Trump they voted against their economic interest. Trump hasn’t and won’t help the health of the poorer, nor improve income inequality, nor in the long run give them jobs that now have migrated to China, India and Europe. What he did give these voters was a sense of pride in being American, as Obama did, but Hilary Clinton couldn’t. “Put America First”, he shouted again and again. Trump blindsided them with talk of dismantling free trade. Even though events and the long run will show he has shot America in the foot, it...

  By Jan Oberg May 24, 2018 About an hour after President Trump had announced another US withdrawal – this time from the Summit with North Korea on June 12 – I commented on RT (formerly Russia Today) and got quite a long time until we were broken off by Trump appearing in the White […]

By Gary Vogler Author or Iraq and the Politics of Oil April 24 marks the 15th anniversary of my initial entry into Baghdad as the senior oil advisor to retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner, our US government civilian leader in Iraq. It was the beginning of my six-plus years in Iraq working in the oil sector and denying the allegation that the Iraq war had an oil agenda. I can no longer refute such an allegation. Originally published by the University Press of Kansas blog here Was there an oil agenda for the Iraq war? If you had asked me that question four years ago, I would have said no, absolutely not. And, I said no on national television in 2014. Ambassador L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer and I went on the Rachel Maddow Show to refute Maddow’s position that the Iraq war was largely about oil. Specifically, I said that...

  By Craig Murray April 16, 2018 Theresa May has issued a long legal justification for UK participation in an attack on a sovereign state. This is so flawed as to be totally worthless. It specifically claims as customary international law practices which are rejected by a large majority of states and therefore cannot be customary international law. It is therefore secondary and of no consequence that the facts and interpretations the argument cites in this particular case are erroneous, but it so happens they are indeed absolutely erroneous. Originally published at Craig Murray’s blog here Let me put before you the government’s legal case in full: 1.This is the Government’s position on the legality of UK military action to alleviate the extreme humanitarian suffering of the Syrian people by degrading the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons capability and deterring their further use, following the chemical weapons attack in Douma on...

By Richard Falk   Introduction The dysfunctionality of the Gulf Crisis, pitting a coalition of four countries, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, and Egypt against tiny Qatar, is emblematic of the descent into multi-dimensional chaos, conflict, and coercion that afflicts much of the Middle East. Qatar may be tiny, but it is wealthy and has chosen for itself a somewhat independent path, and for this reason has experienced the wrath of the more reactionary forces operative in the region and world. At the center of the dysfunction is the manipulation of the political discourse on terrorism, pointing accusing fingers without any regard for evidence or fabrication. My text below seeks to put forward a dispassionate and objective analysis from the perspective of international law and diplomatic protocol of the so-called ’13 Demands’ directed at Qatar by the coalition almost a year ago. Despite having its own internal problems...

. The seemingly eternal president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, has an iron grip on his nation and a foreign policy to match. A large majority of Russians give him their support.  He will win re-election. Is it his early economic success? Or is it because of a new stability? Or the nation’s growing self-respect after the ignominious years that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union? Or is it a sense of besieged defensiveness because of the advantage the West took of Russia afterwards. The answer is a bit of all these. Few in the West seem to talk about what happened after President Boris Yeltsin pushed aside Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union. Few recall the political and economic upheavals of that time and why the stability of Putin’s governance is welcomed by people at large. Perhaps it is because this was a quarter of a...

  By Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) As President Donald Trump prepares to host Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu next week, a group of U.S. intelligence veterans offers corrections to a number of false accusations that have been levelled against Iran. February 26, 2018 Originally published on ConsortiumNews MEMORANDUM FOR:  The President FROM:  Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) SUBJECT:  War With Iran INTRODUCTION In our December 21st Memorandum to you, we cautioned that the claim that Iran is currently the world’s top sponsor of terrorism is unsupported by hard evidence. Meanwhile, other false accusations against Iran have intensified. Thus, we feel obliged to alert you to the virtually inevitable consequences of war with Iran, just as we warned President George W. Bush six weeks before the U.S. attack on Iraq 15 years ago. In our first Memorandum in this genre we told then-President Bush that we saw “no compelling reason” to attack...

By Jan Oberg Western mainstream media and politics disseminate so many negative aspects of China and consider it a serious threat to Western hegemony to such an extent that it is difficult to see any other – more relevant – perspectives. The China-initiated Silk Road and Belt Initiative (BRI), described in links like these, has […]