Portside

This was a big missed opportunity for the network-and for voters. It showed that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, will say just about anything to win in November. Hours before, Trump made an address in Philadelphia where he kowtowed to the Republican foreign-policy establishment, pledging to lavish tax dollars on the military. In a rambling answer to a question about Iraq, Trump noted the biggest mistake made in Iraq was that the U.S. did not 'take the oil.'

The major powers are planning for war and claim that's the best way to defend against war. Will this mutual hawkishness lead to armed conflict?

The Turks don't want a Kurdish mini-state on their frontier any more than the Syrians want to lose territory to the Kurds (and neither do the Iranians, nor do the Russians want a Kurdish state on their border). And, Turkey is warming up to Russia and Iran in a bid to exit before a total rout of its proxies in Syria. Here Robert Fisk and Vijay Prashad present two nuanced perspectives.

In an era of too-big-to fail generals, an age in which top commanders from winless wars retire to take prominent posts at influential institutions and cash in with cushy jobs on corporate boards, AFRICOM chiefs have faced neither hard questions nor repercussions for the deteriorating situation. (Similar records -- heavy on setbacks, short on victories -- have been produced by Washington’s war chiefs in Afghanistan and Iraq for the past 15 years...)

A new book shows how aggressive policing tactics exasperates structural racism and leads to more violence against marginalized communities.

NACLA's editors introduce the latest print issue of the NACLA Report on the Americas - Currency of Death: Unraveling the Political Economy of the Drug Wars.

Noted journalist John Pilger talks about China, Okinawa, and U.S. policy in Asia.

The new initiative will produce the first "truth report" on the U.S. invasion of Panama and could pave the way for reparations for victims.

Astounding increases in the danger of nuclear weapons have paralleled provocative foreign policy decisions that needlessly incite tensions between Washington and Moscow. It's been 71 years since atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and humanity's memory of those events has dimmed. The bombs that obliterated those cities were tiny by today's standards.

The massacre in Orlando was not the largest mass killing in U.S. history, and the United States has been responsible for the massacre of millions around the planet. We should all be mindful of “the nexus between US foreign policy adventures that plunder and violate countries in search of natural resources and US domestic racist actions.” U.S. crimes against humanity stretch from My Lai to Ferguson.