The percentage of US forces in Europe based in Italy has tripled since 1991.

The Pentagon has spent the last two decades plowing hundreds of millions of tax dollars into military bases in Italy, turning the country into an increasingly important center for US military power. Especially since the start of the Global War on Terror in 2001, the military has been shifting its European center of gravity south from Germany, where the overwhelming majority of US forces in the region have been stationed since the end of World War II. In the process, the Pentagon has turned the Italian peninsula into a launching pad for future wars in Africa, the Middle East, and beyond.

At bases in Naples, Aviano, Sicily, Pisa, and Vicenza, among others, the military has spent more than $2 billion on construction alone since the end of the Cold War - and that figure doesn't include billions more on classified construction projects and everyday operating and personnel costs. While the number of troops in Germany has fallen from 250,000 when the Soviet Union collapsed to about 50,000 today, the roughly 13,000 US troops (plus 16,000 family members) stationed in Italy match the numbers at the height of the Cold War. That, in turn, means that the percentage of US forces in Europe based in Italy has tripled since 1991 from around 5% to more than 15%.

Last month, I had a chance to visit the newest US base in Italy, a three-month-old garrison in Vicenza, near Venice. Home to a rapid reaction intervention force, the 173rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), and the Army's component of the US Africa Command (AFRICOM), the base extends for a mile, north to south, dwarfing everything else in the small city. In fact, at over 145 acres, the base is almost exactly the size of Washington's National Mall or the equivalent of around 110 American football fields. The price tag for the base and related construction in a city that already hosted at least six installations: upwards of $600 million since fiscal year 2007.

BBC Newsnight exclusive interview with journalist Glenn Greenwald on Edward Snowden, the PRISM revelations and mass surveillance.

An Italian Senate committee has approved a motion to expel former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, from the parliament over a tax fraud conviction.

The senators voted on Friday to strip Berlusconi of his parliamentary seat after debates were held at the Senate Palace in Rome.

The head of the committee, Dario Stefano, said the committee had "decided by a majority to propose to the Senate assembly to debate invalidating the election of Senator Berlusconi."

The committee's decision must be also ratified by a full Senate chamber vote, which is planned to be held later in the month.

This was the second blow to Berlusconi in just a few days, as he was forced to abandon his bid to topple Prime Minister Enrico Letta on October 2 after more than 40 of his lawmakers said they would defy him and instead vote in support of the coalition government.

Ilija Trojanov was at the airport in Brazil's Salvador da Bahia, on September 30, checking in for his flight to the United States, when the person behind the American Airlines counter told him that the computer had issued a "Border Security Crossing" alert - and that it was necessary to contact the American authorities before he could be issued a boarding pass. As the time for his flight approached he was told the airline was forced to refuse him entry to the flight - and that he must return to Germany.

Trojanov is an acclaimed author of 20 books, including Along the Ganges, Collector of Worlds, and Mumbai to Mecca. He is the co-author of Angriff auf die Freiheit (Attack on Freedom), with Juli Zeh, a 2009 jeremiad against State surveillance. Trojanov was on his way to the Denver conference of the German Studies Association, and had been issued an invitation to appear at the Goethe-Institut's "New Literature From Europe" Festival in November.

He had earlier been denied a visa to enter the United States, but with the help of an American university he was finally granted his travel papers: thus the "security alert" came as a surprise.

So why all the trouble over traveling to the US?

In response to media queries, the US embassy in Berlin had "no comment" to make. That's because no comment was necessary: Trojanov was among the prominent signers of an open letter addressed to German Chancellor Angela Merkel protesting NSA surveillance on German soil as an "historic attack on our democratic, constitutional state." That is clearly the reason for this Soviet-style harassment by the Obama administration.

This latest outrage is part of a disturbing pattern of repression that all points to one ineluctable conclusion: the United States is the Soviet Union of the new millennium - an ideological state with global ambitions that holds itself up as the epitome of "freedom" and yet is the single most powerful enemy of liberty worldwide.

The latest superpower dysfunctional spectacular, aka the US shutdown, has forced President Barack Obama to cancel an entire Asian trip. First the White House announced Obama was shutting down Malaysia and the Philippines - supposed stars of the "pivoting to Asia". Then it was finally confirmed he was also shutting down the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) summit in Bali on Tuesday and the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and East Asia summit next Thursday in Brunei.

That leaves Chinese President Xi Jinping to bask, unrivalled, in center stage glow. As if any extra Stateside "help" was needed, and as if Xi was not already on a roll.

On Thursday, Xi became the first foreign leader ever to address the Indonesian parliament in Jakarta. He stressed that Beijing wanted by all means to boost trade with ASEAN to a whopping US$1 trillion by 2020 - and establish a regional infrastructure bank.

His message, in a nutshell: China and "certain Southeast Asian countries" must solve their wrangling over territorial sovereignty and maritime rights "peacefully" - as in we will discuss that messy South China Sea situation (he made no direct reference to it in his speech) but don't let that interfere with our doing serious business in trade and investment. Who is ASEAN to say no?

And then, after upstaging Obama in Indonesia (hefty tomes could be penned about that), and signing the requisite $30 billion-plus deals (mostly in mining), Xi was off to Malaysia.

Compare Xi's Indonesian triumph - complete with his glamorous wife Peng Liyuan wearing batik - to a recent visit by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who, for all practical purposes, wanted to convince the Indonesians to essentially encircle China. Elaborately polite as usual, the Indonesians brushed Abe aside. China is Indonesia's biggest trading partner after Japan, and it's bound to overtake Tokyo soon.

The administration has been amping up stats about foiled plots to bolster support for mass surveillance

In so many words, NSA director Keith Alexander admitted Wednesday that the Obama administration had issued misleading information about terror plots and their foiling to bolster support for the government's vast surveillance apparatus.

During Wednesday's hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy pushed Alexander to admit that plot numbers had been fudged in a revealing interchange:

The United States is the world's biggest pest. It doesn't matter where you live or what you do, the US will find some excuse to poke its nose in your business and make your life miserable. That's why the US has so many enemies, because its the world's biggest budinski. The people in Washington just can't stand the idea that someone, somewhere might be having a normal, happy life without getting bombed to death in drone attack or shunted off to some black site where the CIA can rip out their fingernails or beat them black and blue. That's what this whole global war on terror-thing is all about. It's about sticking your big fat nose in other people's business 24-7. Some people just get a kick out of that. Why? Because they're obnoxious people, that's why. Like the drunk who shows up at your dinner party and slops red wine all over the rug. That's the US in a nutshell, a first-rate pain-in-the-ass.

Everyone knows this is true, even the flag wavers. They know we shouldn't be in Afghanistan or Iraq or Somalia or Yemen or wherever. We just go to be annoying, because that's who we are, The Irritating States of America.

I get tired of leftist writers droning on and on about the Empire-this and the Superpower-that. It's all baloney, and it misses the point. In fact, it dignifies US behavior as though it was all part of some grand plan. It's not. There is no plan. The plan is to hector people until they can't stand it anymore. That's not really a plan at all. It's just being a pest. It's like the brat who keeps kicking the back of your seat when your flying across country or the wasp that shows up at the company picnic. Are you going to tell me the wasp has a plan? No. The wasp has no plan and neither does the US. The US is just doing what it does best; making a first class nuisance of itself.

SHUTDOWN - blared the Washington Post headline. None of the powers-that-be could stop a small faction of Republicans in the House of Representatives from shutting down many federal government operations starting on October 1.

Suddenly the powerful Business Roundtable and U.S. Chamber of Commerce are powerless, along with two hundred corporate trade associations, who see Uncle Sam as their big customer. Suddenly, the Republican dominated National Governors Association, together with Mitt Romney, the Party's presidential nominee in 2013, are powerless. Also powerless so far are the allegedly sovereign people, who want uninterrupted safety inspections, enforcement of labor and environmental laws, children's nutrition and educational programs (like Head Start), student loan processing, veterans benefits, detection of epidemics, access to national parks, and inspections of nuclear power plants.

All of the above want the federal government to stay open. Most of them do not want to see 800,000 federal workers (out of two million) furloughed. It doesn't matter to House Republicans. About thirty-five to forty obscure, foot-stomping Republicans have scared the easily frightened House Speaker, John Boehner, and his curled-lip deputy, Rep. Eric Cantor, into doing what no foreign enemy since the British burned Washington in 1812 has been able to do. This cohort, representing the most cruel, ignorant, narcissistic Republicans in the Party's history, has closed down much of the national government.

As clocks at the Pentagon approached midnight late Monday evening and inched America towards a government shutdown, the United States Department of Defense spent $5.5 billion dollars on an arsenal of items ordered at the last minute by Uncle Sam.

Foreign Policy reported on Tuesday that the Defense Department awarded 94 contracts totaling over $5.5 billion a day earlier, ensuring the mightiest military on Earth would stay significantly well-stocked throughout an indefinite shutdown that has sent hundreds of thousands of federal workers home without pay and polarized lawmakers in Washington.

Comparatively, Foreign Policy's John Reed noted that on September 3 - the first workday of the month - the Pentagon published news of only 14 contracts: practically one-seventh of what was signed off on as Monday's midnight deadline seemed increasingly more likely to come and go without a compromise.

The shutdown, now in its third day with no end in sight, is costing the US an estimated $300 million in lost economic output each day, according to research firm IHS Inc.

But as hundreds of thousands of federal employees remain furloughed and national parks and programs stay shuttered indefinitely, the Pentagon does not seem to have much to worry about.

"This goes to show that even when the federal government is shut down and the military has temporarily lost half its civilian workforce, the Pentagon can spend money like almost no one else," Reed wrote.

What is freedom really?

Is it the ability to do whatever you like without regard for anyone but yourself?

Some people think so. But more often than not there will eventually come the time of the great hang-over, when that ultimate freedom that had been sought after so diligently has somehow lost its meaning.

"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."