John Daniel Ehrlichman was counsel and domestic policy chief to President Richard Nixon. He was a key figure in events leading to the Watergate first break-in and the ensuing Watergate scandal, for which he was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury and served a year and a half in prison.

Aside from the conspiracy of Watergate, which when compared to today's politicians seems like schoolyard pranks, Ehrlichman, while serving under Nixon, was part of a much larger, and far more detrimental conspiracy that is still playing out today — the war on drugs.

In a new report, in Harper's Magazine, written by Dan Baum, Ehrlichman comes clean on the real reason behind the war on drugs — to criminalize blacks and hippies.

According to Baum, he tracked down Ehrlichman in 1994 at his engineering firm in Atlanta, Georgia.

"You want to know what this was really all about?" Ehrlichman bluntly asked Baum of the war on drugs. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

According to Baum, that was the end of the conversation, "he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company, and led me to the door," recalls Baum.

Turkish military said it launched airstrikes on PKK militants in northern Iraq on Tuesday , Reuters said. At least 13 Turkish fighter jets reportedly took part in the operation. The army hit shelters, caves and ammunition depots used by PKK fighters in northern Iraq and in areas near the town of Semdinli, in the Hakkari province of southeast Turkey, the statement from the Turkish military said. Turkey believes the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) is a terrorist organization, and Ankara has blamed the Kurdish separatist group for a number of recent terrorist attacks in the country. The Turkish military has repeatedly hit PKK targets in northern Iraq in recent months.

Earlier in March, Turkish warplanes bombed camps belonging to the PKK in the north of Iraq. Also in March, the Turkish Air Force bombed at least five PKK targets in different locations in Iraq, with Ankara claiming 67 militants were killed. On December 9, 10 Turkish F-16 fighter jets targeted Kurdish positions in northern Iraq, with the Turkish military saying that its targets were "destroyed in an aerial campaign." In December 2015, Ankara deployed about 150 soldiers and 25 tanks to Iraq's Nineveh province, without asking permission from Baghdad. Ankara argued that its soldiers were sent to northern Iraq to counter a threat from Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) to Turkish military instructors training anti-terrorist forces in the area.

A Newport couple had a Christmas they never will forget.

Kurt and Lori Haskell sat seven rows behind a 23-year-old Nigerian man on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam who now has been charged with trying to destroy the plane in what is believed to be an attempted act of terrorism.

The Haskells were coming home from a safari vacation in Uganda and were on layover in Amsterdam on Christmas. While sitting on the floor waiting to board, Mr. Haskell said he noticed something unusual.

An Indian man who "looked wealthy and was dressed in a nice suit" approached the ticket counter with a young man.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz called for law enforcement in the U.S. to clamp down on Muslim neighborhoods in an effort to stop them from becoming "radicalized" after the terror attacks in Brussels.

The GOP presidential contender came right out of the box Tuesday morning calling for President Obama to immediately return from Cuba in order to deal with the crisis in Belgium that claimed dozens of lives.

In a statement posted to his Facebook account, Cruz criticized European nations for allowing migrants into their countries, saying, "Our European allies are now seeing what comes of a toxic mix of migrants who have been infiltrated by terrorists and isolated, radical Muslim neighborhoods."

The cases, brought to the court by several legal and activist groups, include wide-ranging charges of war crimes against Israel. A Palestinian delegation presented documents to the International Criminal Court to try Israel - and possibly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - for war crimes.

The delegation, acting on behalf of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority, recounted the history of Israeli settlements and presented cases against Israeli operations in Hebron and East Jerusalem. Its claims spanned from water deprivation to environmental damage to abuse of Palestinian prisoners. The Dawabsha family, killed in their sleep during a firebombing, and Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a teenager kidnapped and burned alive, were brought up as specific cases of war crimes.

When the P5+1 Nuclear Talks were completed, and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was put into practice, jubilant words resounded from many places. The "reformist movement" within Iranian politics used the nuclear deal as a campaign issue and swept up victories in the recent parliamentary elections. Meanwhile, the Republican Party writhed with the anger of defeat, inviting Netanyahu to address Congress against Obama's wishes, and screaming doomsday predictions about a "nuclear-armed Iran" after the deal was signed.

The expectation of all parties involved, and the many voices supporting the negotiation process, was that after the deal was signed, the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran would become much friendlier. The nuclear deal was expected to open a new chapter of diplomacy, resolving the decades of intense hostility.

Ballistic Missile Deceptions

However, this has not taken place. The signing of the nuclear deal and the lifting of the nuclear-related sanctions imposed on Iran has been followed by swift and blatant acts of aggression against Iran — not only from the United States, but from its allies around the world.

Almost immediately after the deal was signed, US leaders began to denounce Iran's ballistic missile system. Iran maintains ballistic missiles for the purpose of self-defense. Iran's regional enemy, Israel, is known for erratic, unannounced attacks on its neighbors. It has invaded Lebanon five times, and it randomly attacked Iraq in 1981.

Americans rarely excell at the game of chess in the manner that many Russians do. The last great world-class chess master from the United States was Bobby Fischer whose zenith was reached in 1971. Mostly, over the past several decades, Washington has relied on an arrogant brute force - might makes right - to push its globalist agenda for what Michael Ledeen, a neo-conservative, once called Universal Fascism. It means total, absolute control of people, nations, trade flows, of life itself by a global corporativist cartel. The ultimate US brute force game against her long-standing nemesis, Russia, is creation of a "missile shield" aimed at Russia. In 2007, George W. Bush announced Washington was going to deploy what it called Ballistic Missile Defense. It was more or less the beginning of deep and now fundamental distrust by Russia and by Vladimir Putin of Washington's honesty and her intentions. Now Moscow, in what appears a brilliant chess move, unveils a surprise response.

A brief look at the situation at the beginning of the 1990's as the Soviet Union was deconstructed, is useful to understand the dynamics of Russian foreign and military policy today.

US Secretary of State James Baker III met with the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and gave him a pledge that, in return for the Soviets allowing the two Germanys to reunite, Washington would never extend NATO eastward.

In response to that solemn US pledge, the formerly formidable Soviet Union, now a vastly reduced Russian Federation, promised Washington and NATO that it would systematically dismantle its nuclear arsenal. Toward that end, the Russian Duma ratified a Start II Treaty for reduction of actively deployed nuclear weapons. They made the ratification contingent on both the US and Russia's adhering to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty which prohibited deployment of an active missile defense shield by either side.

As has become common in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, shortly after the bomb attacks in Brussels, people have been blaming... oh, pretty much the entire Muslim population. How 1.7 billion people who are either adherents of, or loosely connected to, the world's second-biggest religion could be responsible for these attacks is beyond me. Many took to Twitter to tweet their support for 'the removal of Islam' via the hashtag 'StopIslam', blaming the religion for the lives lost in the Brussels terrorist attacks (and those before), thus pretty much pointing the finger at all Muslims for the existence of terror itself.

Tweets using the trending hashtag include either anti-Islam sentiment, or support for Islam by Muslims who use the hashtag to repeat the obvious: that they are "Muslim, but not a terrorist." Apparently, people forget that the biggest victims of terror are Muslim. Indeed, by saying that Muslims are responsible for these terror attacks, one is saying that (to name a few examples)...

• the 37 Muslim Afghan civilians who died at an airport as a result of an attack by the Taliban in December 2015;
• the 750 Muslim Iraqi civilians who died as a result of attacks by terrorist groups in the month April 2014;
• the 15 Syrian civilians who died near a hospital as a result of terror attacks by Daesh in December 2015;

...are all, in one way or another, responsible for attacks in the West.

It boggles the mind.

Saudi Arabia is the world's largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba - but the Saudi government is reluctant to stem the flow of money, according to Hillary Clinton.

"More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups," says a secret December 2009 paper signed by the US secretary of state. Her memo urged US diplomats to redouble their efforts to stop Gulf money reaching extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide," she said.

Three other Arab countries are listed as sources of militant money: Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.


The cables highlight an often ignored factor in the Pakistani and Afghan conflicts: that the violence is partly bankrolled by rich, conservative donors across the Arabian Sea whose governments do little to stop them.

The problem is particularly acute in Saudi Arabia, where militants soliciting funds slip into the country disguised as holy pilgrims, set up front companies to launder funds and receive money from government-sanctioned charities.

After string of extremist incidents targeting heart of Europe over past year, leaders may have to resort to much tougher measures.

Authorities in Europe and across the world tightened security at airports, railway stations, government buildings and other key sites after deadly attacks Tuesday on the Brussels airport and its subway system.

With Brussels in lockdown and the French prime minister saying that Europe is "at war," European leaders held emergency security meetings and deployed more police, explosives experts, sniffer dogs and plainclothes officers, with some warning against travel to Belgium.

The nervousness was felt far and wide. In New York City, authorities deployed additional counter terrorism units to crowded areas and transit locations.

After a string of extremist attacks targeting the heart of Europe over the past year, some analysts say Europe will finally have to implement a much tougher level of security not only at airports, but also at "soft targets" like shopping malls — the kind that Israelis have been living with for years.