PRESS ROOM

Only deeper study, discourse, and evidence-gathering around the threats to national security from TPLF will lead to meaningful consideration of the risks it poses – and whether they rise to justifying policy intervention. If nothing else, such inquiry can also have the effect of improving overall trust in TPLF. But to disregard it leaves our legal systems vulnerable and ignores what could become, or already is, a critical battlefield in the fight against malign foreign influence.

"'A three to five percent increase in Pentagon spending would be a colossal waste of funds that should be used to address more urgent security challenges, most of which are not military in nature,' said William Hartung, director of the Arms Security Program at the left-leaning Center for International Policy."

Reports that the Biden administration’s Pentagon budget proposal may come in at roughly last year’s level are disappointing given the need to invest in other urgent security priorities. At a time when pandemics, climate change, white supremacy, and racial and economic injustice are the greatest immediate risks we face, it is strategically unwise and economically unaffordable to stick with business as usual on Pentagon spending.

Listen to William Hartung's appearance in a special Election 2020 series of The President's Inbox. He joins host James M. Lindsay alongside Mackenzie Eaglen to discuss defense spending.

After some hints to the contrary, it turns out French troops in the Sahel aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. So said President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on February 16, even before his virtual summit with France’s former-colonial "partners" – Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, and Chad – comprising the G5 Sahel Joint Force. Formed in 2014, it’s described in bureaucratic Paris-speak as "an intergovernmental cooperation framework, in order to put forward a regional response to the various challenges." In reality, the G5 are little more than a misfit crew of problematic proxies doing the bidding of the French generals leading a seven years-running Operation Barkhane – and that of America’s AFRICOM proconsuls propping-up Paris’s pet forever war in the Sahel.

Bombing Syria and excusing the crimes of the Saudi crown prince won’t bring us any closer to a withdrawal from the Middle East.

"They've made a calculated decision that says, 'You know, we're really losing the battle here (in Washington). We've got to take this battle out into America,'" said Ben Freeman, director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy, a nonprofit foreign policy research group.

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army major who served several tours in America’s forever wars on Iraq and Afghanistan in the late 2000s. Amid his deployments, he recognized these illegal wars of aggression for what they are and gave them an abrupt about-face. He’s now a prolific antiwar activist, writer, speaker, and podcaster.

"'Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund was directly involved in the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi by using its planes to transport the monarchy's assassins,' said Sunjeev Bery, the executive director of Freedom Forward, an advocacy group that aims to end US support for non-democratic countries."

"'Cutting off all military support for Saudi Arabia should be one component of a shift in policy that holds the regime accountable for its abominable human rights record and its consistent violations of the laws of war,' Bill Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Policy, said last week after a U.S. intelligence assessment concluded the crown prince ordered Khashoggi’s murder."

"In this edition of Straight Talk Africa host Shaka Ssali reflects on some of the major developments in the Republic of Sudan. He is joined by Nureldin Satti, Ambassador of the Republic of the Sudan to the U.S., Temi Ibirogba, program and research associate for the Center for International Policy's Africa program, and John Tanza Mabusu, host and managing editor of VOA’s South Sudan in Focus."

“When the U.S. government says the exact person who signed a lobbying contract with your firm is one of the people responsible for Khashoggi’s gruesome murder, how do you sleep at night?” he asked in an email. “How do you not question whether the work you’re doing is literally helping people get away with murder?”