Portside

Ominous developments in three states this summer -- Oregon, Texas, New Jersey, and one city -- Chicago, provide a glimpse into the Pentagon's new playbook to recruit soldiers from high schools across the country. In brief, the military has been engaged in a robust lobbying campaign to lower academic standards to make it easier to recruit youth.

Globe-Trotting U.S. Special Ops Forces Already Deployed to 137 Nations in 2017.

Central America policy-making, hardly an open book to begin with, is set to become more secretive. What we do know is U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will be there, as will Vice President Mike Pence — and of course, General John F. Kelly, the director of Homeland Security and the previous head of SOUTHCOM.

As I watch current events in Venezuela, I am haunted by memories of Chile. I lived in Chile from July 1972 until February 1973, while socialist Salvador Allende was president. I left Chile months before the fascist coup, although I had planned to return. That door closed.

“This is a war against normal life.” So said CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward, describing the situation at this moment in Syria, as well as in other parts of the Middle East.

If the Trump administration truly wants to find a way out of the wars in the Middle East, it should stop arming, aiding, and abetting the ruthless Saudi regime.

Secret U.S. military documents reveal a constellation of American military bases across Africa. With the Trump administration escalating its wars in Africa and the Middle East, and the potential for more crises -- from catastrophic famines to spreading wars -- on the horizon, there’s every reason to believe the U.S. military’s footprint on the continent will continue to evolve, expand, and enlarge in the years ahead, outpost by outpost and base by base.

Under the guise of increased transparency, the administration has revealed partial information about its targeted killing program. But much remains classified. And what we do know does not comply with the law.

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...)

Strangely, amid the spike in racial tensions after the killing of two black men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, and of five white police officers by a black sharpshooter in Dallas, one American reality has gone unmentioned. The U.S. has been fighting wars -- declared, half-declared, and undeclared -- for almost 15 years and, distant as they are, they’ve been coming home in all sorts of barely noted ways.