Author: Anne Brown

The headlines wrote themselves before the meeting even happened: Xi and Putin together in Moscow, the two great autocrats embracing against the Western world. Another “no limits partnership” photo op. Another chance for the pundit class to warn about the emerging axis of authoritarianism. Then Xi opened his mouth and said something different. The Institute for the Study of War caught it. Two articles, published simultaneously on March 19, one in Chinese state media from Putin, one in Russian state media from Xi. Read them together and you see the gap. Putin’s piece was classic Russian grievance politics. The collective…

The question itself feels obscene, doesn’t it? Comparing the FBI to the Gestapo. That’s the kind of rhetorical excess that gets you dismissed as a crank, a conspiracy theorist, someone who’s watched too many movies and lost the plot. Except the men and women saying it are not cranks. They’re not conspiracy theorists. They’re FBI agents with twenty years in, counting days until they can retire, nursing a genuine, deep-seated hatred for their own director and his coterie of Deep State lackeys. When people who have spent their careers inside an institution start using that kind of language, you should…

Let me start with a confession: I’ve been around long enough to watch presidents come and go, to see the machinery of politics grind men into dust and elevate others to sainthood based on nothing more than timing and luck. I’ve seen Democrats savage Republicans and Republicans savage Democrats. I’ve seen media turn every policy disagreement into a moral crisis and every personal failing into proof of unfitness. But I have never seen anything like what Donald Trump has endured. Not even Lincoln, called a gorilla and a baboon by his own Secretary of War, faced this kind of round-the-clock,…

Anyone who embraces the stupid and absurd claim that Russia’s military intelligence outfit, the GRU, is paying the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan is either ignorant or congenitally retarded. There is no gray area here. The claim is a lie. Let me explain why this is so obvious that only people with an agenda could miss it. The Taliban do not need a financial incentive to kill American soldiers. They have been doing that willingly for twenty years. It’s their entire reason for existence. The idea that they require Russian bounties to motivate them to fight the infidel…

This article lays out a detailed case that the Mueller Report’s framing of George Papadopoulos is misleading—both in its timeline and in how it characterizes the origin of key information used to justify opening the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. How the Mueller Report introduces Papadopoulos Right out of the gate, the Mueller Report places George Papadopoulos at the center of a decisive triggering event. It states that after WikiLeaks’ first release of stolen documents, a foreign government alerted the FBI about a May 2016 interaction involving Papadopoulos. The report suggests he implied the Trump Campaign had learned—through some connection to…

Do not believe a word you have heard from the Pentagon and the White House about the “success” of the cruise missile strikes on Syria. A fraud is being perpetrated on the American people, and the men wearing stars on their shoulders have dishonored themselves by going along with it. If you could sit in the Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, if you could talk to the officers working for CENTCOM away from the microphones and the press releases, you would hear something very different from what the networks are telling you. You would…

I was a student in the Military Intelligence Officer Advanced Course at Ft Holabird, Maryland, in 1967-1968. The course lasted about ten months, and we were required to take several electives from a group of offered electives. I chose Cryptology, taught by people from the NSA School at nearby Ft. Meade. This was the winter or early spring of 1967-1968. The course included several sub-courses, one of which dealt with voice intercepts. During that section, the instructor introduced a booklet produced at Ft Meade as course material. It contained various items, and among them were transcripts of translated intercepts of…