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.

Majida and Adly Abumayaleh were just driving across their suburban Minneapolis-area neighborhood on a Friday night to get their teen son from a party. Until a self-appointed watchwoman, Nancy Kay Knoble, decided they might be agents of international jihad and grabbed a rifle.

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.

Shit is tough for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. You gotta sell the oil, keep it chummy with the United States, and also prove you deserve to run things around the holiest sites for all Muslims. Which means you gotta be holier than thou. Which means you gotta get more sword-happy head-cutter-offers.

Come on, America, you knock-kneed purty little princess. Did you really think you could handle being ruled by a POTUS so potent he grows surplus pubes on his stiff upper lip?

Ten years ago today, in the Fergana Valley of Uzbekistan, a mass of people gathered to protest arrests and violence by state police. Authorities shot at least 1,000 to death. The figures remain sketchy, in part because U.S. officials—led by Donald Rumsfeld—opposed an investigation of a valued partner in the war on terror.

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.

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.

But man, watch them make Ukraine disappear!

In searching for a photo to accompany this post recounting old and new instances of Dick Cheney’s Iran warmongering, I discovered something weird: Associated Press photographers had amassed a trove of shots of Cheney creepily lurking behind Dubya for eight damn years.

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.

Desperate to stand apart from the pack and court soccer moms with a thirst for waterboarding, future presidential also-ran Marco Rubio staked out a remarkable policy position on day one of his campaign: He'd grow the detainee population at Guantánamo and "aggressively" pump prisoners for intelligence.

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.

Post-peace hipster follicle-farm John Bolton is the latest contestant in the New York Times' "Who can write the insanest Strangelove shit about scary Persians?" sweepstakes, with an entry that concludes we must bomb... something somewhere. But if you pan this stream of consciousness long enough, a gold nugget turns up.

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?"