Free Republic

Juan Pablo Escobar Henao, son of notorious Medellín cartel drug kingpin, Pablo Escobar, now says his father “worked for the CIA.” In a new book, “Pablo Escobar In Fraganti,” Escobar, who lives under the pseudonym, Juan Sebastián Marroquín, explains his “father worked for the CIA selling cocaine to finance the fight against Communism in Central America.” “The drug business is very different than what we dreamed,” he continues. “What the CIA was doing was buying the controls to get the drug into their country and getting a wonderful deal.” “He did not make the money alone,” Marroquín elaborated in an...

... n unprecedented report from the corporate press claims U.S. forces have participated in extreme torture and abuse of detainees accused of affiliation with Al Qaeda in Yemen — including “the ‘grill,’ in which the victim is tied to a spit like a roast and spun in a circle of fire,” the Associated Press finds. A network of secretive prisons in southern Yemen provide the backdrop for the alleged barbaric acts allegedly carried out by forces from the U.S. and United Arab Emirates — many of those detention facilities remain hidden in plain sight. That some of the covert prisons...

Late Thursday evening, the Wall Street Journal reported, 51 State Department officials signed a statement condemning U.S. policy in Syria in which they repeatedly call for “targeted military strikes against the Damascus government and urging regime change as the only way to defeat Islamic State.” “In other words,” as Zero Hedge summarized, “over 50 top ‘diplomats’ are urging to eliminate [Syrian Pres. Bashar al] Assad in order to ‘defeat ISIS’, the same ISIS which top US ‘diplomats’ had unleashed previously in order to … eliminate Assad.” This gordian knot created by United States foreign policy — and intensified by that...

*More people in the United States than ever are breaking away from the political duopoly by refusing to self-identify as either Democrat or Republican -- and they now effectively comprise the true silent majority: Independents.* According to a Gallup poll released Monday, for 2015, just 29% of respondents call themselves Democrats, while 26% identify as Republicans -- but fully 42% say 'nay' to both parties and claim to be Independents, down only marginally from 43% last year. Indeed, Independents as a group reached 40% of the population for the first time in 2011, and have comprised at least that percentage...