Who’s to blame for ISIS’s rise to power in Syria and Iraq? How do we stop it? What’s the end goal really look like? If you read Gawker’s April interview with badass intel officer Malcolm Nance, you know a bit about these questions. He offers more (depressing) background today in the Intercept.

In addition to an aggressive goatee, Gulmurod Khalimov has a certain set of skills. He commands Tajikistan’s special forces, trained and funded by American military whizzes. Or he did, before recently turning up in a YouTube video saying he’s gone to Syria to fight with the Islamic State.

Leading Sharia shaykh and Muslim Brother-in-chief Barack Obama, who fiendishly vowed to “reassess” the United States’ special relationship with Israel, has finally laid bare his plans to kill the vulnerable Jewish state and its fragile democracy: He will choke it to death with billions in new bombs and missiles.

A soon-to-be-released military audit will reveal that “a number of Pentagon employees” gambled and solicited escorts in Atlantic City and Las Vegas on the taxpayer dime, prompting one U.S. senator to remind civil servants not to use their government credit cards “for prostitutes.”

Last week, we told you about the Department of Homeland Security’s “fusion center” in Baltimore and its ability to spy on Baltimore during the city’s unrest. But where would it get its info? Thanks to a few enterprising Twitter users, we have one possible answer: nondescript spy planes circling the city.

Florida and Navy officials revealed last Friday that they’re investigating an incident in which a U.S. Navy hovercraft being operated off-base by military contractors ran over a kayaker at high speed, leaving him bloodied in the water off Panama City Beach.

Rand Paul, the great white hope, presumed enemy of extrajudicial killings from the air, shocked and disappointed his libertarian disciples today by embracing drone warfare and defending President Obama’s use of flying death machines to immolate two hostages held by Al Qaeda.

There was Dick Cheney, as always, arguing that the only way to deal with Iran was to bomb it back to 1953. But President George W. Bush, on the unanimous advice of his generals, decided such a campaign would be a disaster—and Cheney began an end run that’s working wonders with today’s top Republicans.

In 2007, folksy war addict Mike Huckabee told Meet the Press viewers that it’s dangerous “to oppose a sitting commander in chief while we’ve got people being shot at on the ground.” But it’s election time! So now, willing Americans, stay out of the military until you have a commander in chief that pleases Huck.

Last week, we posed a question. This week, we have an answer: "Senator Tom Cotton," Republican of Arkansas, is in fact not a natural human organism, but a hybrid experiment in which the brain of German general Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff has been grafted onto the frame of a pugnacious giraffe.

Someday, friend-shooting mountain warlord Dick Cheney is going to unzip his skin and Andy Kaufman will leap out. Until then, we can enjoy his slapstick apocalyptic-shaman shtick, like this interview yesterday in which he vacillated "between the various theories" on why Barack Obumbler is so weak and evil.

Future generations will read of a warmongering Southern senator named Cotton and think we made that shit up. Will they be right? Let's lay out what we know, and what we don't.

Jet jockeys gotta be able to see. I mean, once their jet gets off the ground, which the F-35 will, eventually, at some point in the next two decades, after 19 years and a trillion or so dollars in development. In the meantime, check out this boss helmet for F-35 pilots that costs about as much as a city in South Dakota.

The logo and the company name change, but business stays the same. The mercenary syndicate formerly known as Blackwater has raked in more than half a billion dollars from U.S. contracts to thoroughly fail at stemming the terrorist-supported trade in Afghan opium, according to a new government report.

As nuclear negotiations between Iran and U.S. allies go down to the wire, the Islamic Republic has accused America of killing two of its advisers in the ground war in Iraq with an unmanned aerial vehicle—though U.S. officials say the allegation has no merit.

Federal authorities late yesterday arrested Spc. Hasan Edmonds, 22, a Illinois Army National Guard soldier, and his cousin Jonas, 29, for attempting to join the Islamic State's anti-Western jihad, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Is the world flat enough for you yet? Do you require more flattening? 'Cause it can be arranged. Nay, it should be, according to Tom Friedman, who—and he's just spitballing here—wonders, in the New York Times, where he is paid to spitball for Pulitzers: "Should we be arming ISIS?"

As the director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives prepares to defend his budget before angry pro-gun senators Thursday, the agency is hitting the brakes on a plan to ban a type of armor-piercing ammunition after pushback from gun activists, sources tell Gawker.

Kurdish forces besieging an ISIS-held position Tuesday have confirmed that Ashley Johnston, 28, an Australian pictured above at right, was killed fighting with the Kurds, making him apparently the first English-speaking Westerner to die in combat against the Islamic State.

It takes a special kind of person to leave home and join a foreign militia to fight the theocratic brutes of the Islamic State's army. It takes an even more special person to realize, a little too late, that his chosen anti-ISIS militia holds a political and religious ideology that's as antithetical to his own as ISIS's.