Introduction by the Saker: During my recent hurricane-induced evacuation from Florida, I had the pleasure to see some good friends of mine (White Russian emigrés and American Jews who now consider themselves American and who fully buy into the official propaganda about the USA) who sincerely think of themselves as liberals, progressives and anti-imperialists. These are kind, decent and sincere people, but during our meeting they made a number of statements which completely contradicted their professed views. After writing this letter to them I realized that there might be many more people out there who, like myself, are desperately trying to open the eye of good but completely mislead people about the reality of Empire. I am sharing this letter in the hope that it might maybe offer a few useful talking points to others in their efforts to open the eyes of their friends and relatives.

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Dear friends:

During our conversation you stated the following:

1. The USA needs a military
2. One of the reasons why the USA needs a military are regimes like the North Korean one
3. The USA has a right to intervene outside its borders on a) pragmatic and b) moral grounds
4. During WWII the USA "saved Europe" and acquired a moral right to "protect" other friends and allies
5. The Allies (USSR-US-UK) were morally superior to the Nazis
6. The Americans brought peace, prosperity and freedom to Europe.
7. Yes, mistakes were made, but this is hardly a reason to forsake the right to intervene

I believe that all seven of these theses are demonstratively false, fallacies based on profoundly mistaken assumptions and that they all can be debunked by common sense and indisputable facts.

On March 22, Rep. Devin Nunes made his ham-fisted disclosure that the Obama administration had conducted incidental surveillance collection and unmasking of Trump administration officials. It was a revelation that ignited widespread criticism from nearly every corner of Washington

"I have seen intelligence reports that clearly show that the president-elect and his team were, I guess, at least monitored," the House intelligence chairman said at the time. "It looks to me like it was all legally collected, but it was essentially a lot of information on the president-elect and his transition team and what they were doing." Nunes went on to claim that the information was spread across a number of agencies and had "little or no apparent intelligence value."

Perhaps Nunes' reasons were partisan. Perhaps his framing was exaggerated. We'll see. But if CNN's reporting is correct, everything Nunes claimed that day was basically true. Which is a lot more than we can say for others.

"We're run by the Pentagon, we're run by Madison Avenue, we're run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don't revolt we'll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche.... As long as we go out and buy stuff, we're at their mercy... We all live in a little Village. Your Village may be different from other people's Villages, but we are all prisoners."- Patrick McGoohan

First broadcast in Great Britain 50 years ago, The Prisoner-a dystopian television series described as "James Bond meets George Orwell filtered through Franz Kafka"-confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the freedom of the individual, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of humankind to meekly accept their lot in life as a prisoner in a prison of their own making.

Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner (17 episodes in all) centers around a British secret agent who abruptly resigns only to find himself imprisoned, monitored by militarized drones, and interrogated in a mysterious, self-contained, cosmopolitan, seemingly tranquil retirement community known only as the Village. The Village is an idyllic setting with parks and green fields, recreational activities and even a butler.

While luxurious and resort-like, the Village is a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise: its inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, their movements are tracked by surveillance drones, and they are stripped of their individuality and identified only by numbers.

The series' protagonist, played by Patrick McGoohan, is Number Six.

Number Two, the Village administrator, acts as an agent for the unseen and all-powerful Number One, whose identity is not revealed until the final episode.

"I am not a number. I am a free man," was the mantra chanted on each episode of The Prisoner, which was largely written and directed by McGoohan.

In the opening episode ("The Arrival"), Number Six meets Number Two, who explains to him that he is in The Village because information stored "inside" his head has made him too valuable to be allowed to roam free "outside."

Throughout the series, Number Six is subjected to interrogation tactics, torture, hallucinogenic drugs, identity theft, mind control, dream manipulation, and various forms of social indoctrination and physical coercion in order to "persuade" him to comply, give up, give in and subjugate himself to the will of the powers-that-be.

Number Six refuses to comply.

In every episode, Number Six resists the Village's indoctrination methods, struggles to maintain his own identity, and attempts to escape his captors. "I will not make any deals with you," he pointedly remarks to Number Two. "I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own."

Yet no matter how far Number Six manages to get in his efforts to escape, it's never far enough.

Hillary, who during the campaign trail condemned "dark-money" Super-PACs, has funneled over 800K from her Campaign over to one of these very same outfits. It has been revealed that the failed presidential candidate's Super-PAC, "Onward Together", is heavily backing "resistance" and Alt-Left extremist groups such as ANTIFA.

In building investigations, Daily Caller first discovered that Hillary transferred a mass sum of money from her campaign over to Onward Together:

Clinton transferred $800,000 from her failed 2016 presidential campaign to Onward Together shortly before announcing the group's launch in May, documents the campaign filed with the FEC reveal.

Now, today, it has been revealed by Offended America exactly where that money is going:

President Trump wished the CIA a happy 70th anniversary on Monday and shared a video of a speech he gave at the agency's Langley, Va., headquarters in January, where he criticized the media and was applauded by his aides, not the senior CIA officials at the event.

"Happy 70th Birthday @CIA," Trump tweeted Monday morning.

Attached to the tweet was a video clip from Jan. 21 in which he said "there is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the CIA than Donald Trump."

In the clip, Trump pledged to be the strongest backer of the intelligence agency, then pivoted to criticizing the media for making up stories about issues between his administration and federal agencies.

For a man who once criticized the Clinton Foundation for taking millions of dollars in 'donations' from Wall Street "Fat Cats," Obama seems to be in a rush to replicate the lucrative Clinton scam via his very own Obama Foundation. As Bloomberg points out this morning, since leaving office in January, Obama has already collected millions in speaking fees from the same Wall Street banks that may have cost Hillary her shot at the White House.

Last month, just before her book "What Happened" was published, Barack Obama spoke in New York to clients of Northern Trust Corp. for about $400,000, a person familiar with his appearance said. Last week, he reminisced about the White House for Carlyle Group LP, one of the world's biggest private equity firms, according to two people who were there. Next week, he'll give a keynote speech at investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald LP's health-care conference.

Obama is coming to Wall Street less than a year after leaving the White House, following a path that's well trod and well paid. While he can't run for president, he continues to be an influential voice in a party torn between celebrating and vilifying corporate power. His new work with banks might suggest which side of the debate he'll be on and disappoint anyone expecting him to avoid a trap that snared Clinton. Or, as some of his executive friends see it, he's just a private citizen giving a few paid speeches to other successful people while writing his next book.

"He was the president of the entire United States -- financial services are under that umbrella," said former UBS Group AG executive Robert Wolf, an early supporter who joined the Obama Foundation board this year. "He doesn't look at Wall Street like, 'Oh, these are individuals who don't want the best for the country.' He doesn't stereotype."

Now all he needs to do is use his foundation to raise money for Hurricane Irma victims in Barbuda, use that money to hire his buddies to rebuild the island and then sit back and wait for the kickbacks to roll in...then the transition to the Clinton Foundation will be complete.

Azerbaijan has suddenly been subjected to a massive infowar attack in response to its increasingly independent foreign policy reducing the US' level of control over this strategic energy supplier, and the end result of this coordinated operation is to replace the Turkic country with "Israel" as the EU's anchor in a reconstructed Southern Energy Corridor.

International media has been abuzz over the past two weeks concerning the allegations levelled against Azerbaijan in two high-profile "leaks". The first one originated earlier this summer and claims to prove through purportedly hacked emails from one of the country's embassies that Azerbaijan has clandestinely played a key role in the global arms trade, especially the one with non-state actors such as Daesh. The second one is less sensational but similarly explosive because it tries to tie Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to a major influence operation all across the EU, one which his enemies have framed as a bribery ring. The timing of these two major offensives against Azerbaijan's reputation and soft power isn't coincidental, as it all perfectly correlates to larger ongoing processes in Eurasia as the world transitions towards an emerging Multipolar World Order.

Azerbaijan has begun to practice a more independent foreign policy as its international balancing act acquired crucial strength through the country's ongoing rapprochement with Russia, which has manifested itself in the ambitious cross-continental North-South Transport Corridor with Iran and India, as well as through the skillful employment of "military diplomacy". Concurrent with Turkey's newfound Great Power partnership with Russia - in spite of the 2015 anti-terrorist fighter jet provocation carried out by the Fethullah Gulen Terrorist Organization (FETO) and the subsequent pro-American coup attempt against President Erdogan less than a year later - Azerbaijan has followed in the footsteps of its fraternal state and altogether allowed Russia to maximize its influence to historically unseen proportions along its southern Mideast-Caucasus periphery.

NSA agents successfully targeted "the entire business chain" connecting foreign cafes to the internet, bragged about an "all-out effort" to spy on liberated Iraq, and began systematically trying to break into virtual private networks, according to a set of internal agency news reports dating to the first half of 2005.

British spies, meanwhile, were made to begin providing new details about their informants via a system of "Intelligence Source Descriptors" created in response to intelligence failures in Iraq. Hungary and the Czech Republic pulled closer to the National Security Agency.

And future Intercept backer Pierre Omidyar visited NSA headquarters for an internal conference panel on "human networking" and open-source intelligence.

These stories and more are contained in a batch of 294 articles from SIDtoday, the internal news website of the NSA's core Signals Intelligence Directorate. The Intercept is publishing the articles in redacted form as part of an ongoing project to release material from the files provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In addition to the aforementioned highlights, summarized in further detail below, the documents show how the NSA greatly expanded a secret eavesdropping partnership with Ethiopia's draconian security forces in the Horn of Africa, as detailed in an investigation by longtime Intercept contributor Nick Turse. They describe the NSA's operations at a base in Digby, England, where the agency worked with its British counterpart GCHQ to help direct drones in the Middle East and tap into communications through the Arab Spring uprisings, according to a separate article by Intercept reporter Ryan Gallagher. And they show how the NSA and GCHQ thwarted encryption systems used to protect peer-to-peer file sharing through the apps Kazaa and eDonkey, as explained here by Intercept technologist Micah Lee.

NSA did not comment for this article.

If Donald Trump decides to attack Russia, he will do it more decisively than any other US president would.

This statement comes from the conference of "Yalta International Strategy" in Kiev, by Speaker of the US Congress Newt Gingrich.

"There will be consensus and people will understand that Russia is not a neighbor who has a different point of view, but an enemy. And you need to resist it. The category of people around whom Trump surrounds himself, if they plan an attack, it will be very decisive. Trump is by nature very aggressive. If he comes to the conclusion that it is necessary to limit Putin, he will take greater risks than any other American politician, "Gingrich said.

He predicted the withdrawal of Russia first from the Donbass, and then from the Crimea.

An Iranian Army commander warns that Tehran will raze Tel Aviv and Haifa to the ground if Israel makes any mistake, local media report. The commander also said Israel will not last longer than 25 years.

Major General Abdolrahim Mousavi, who became commander-in-chief of the Islamic Republic of Iran Army (AJA) in August this year, said on Monday that Israel may exist for a maximum of 25 more years, as cited by Tasnim news agency.