Saturday, March 22, 2008

Hillary's Problems with the Truth

Consortiumnews.com's Editors
March 22, 2008

To the dismay of some Hillary Clinton supporters, Consortiumnews.com has noted a disturbing trend in the candidate’s handling of the truth, as she and her advisers have exaggerated her accomplishments and sometimes distorted Barack Obama’s words.

The Washington Post reached a similar conclusion in awarding Sen. Clinton the maximum of “four Pinocchios” for telling a “whopper” in her claims about derring-do during her 1996 trip to war-torn Bosnia.

Read on.

Obama's 'Michael Douglas Moment'

By Robert Parry
March 22, 2008

Barack Obama’s speech on race – both laying out the nation’s multi-sided racial resentments and pointing to a path beyond them – might be called his “Michael Douglas moment,” reminiscent of the speech near the end of “The American President.”

In the climactic scene of that 1995 movie, the President (played by Douglas) responds to political attacks against his girlfriend over an old photograph of a burning American flag and to insinuations about his own alleged lack of patriotism reflected in his American Civil Liberties Union membership.

Read on.

Five Years On, How to Leave Iraq

By Ivan Eland
March 22, 2008

Although the U.S. troop “surge” has had some effect, it is probably not the most important factor dampening violence back down to the levels of mid-2004.

Read on.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Obama's Passportgate: Historical Echo

By Robert Parry
March 21, 2008

Five presidential elections ago, when another George Bush was in the White House and when Bill Clinton was the Democratic nominee, State Department officials conducted an improper search of Clinton’s passport files, an echo of the current case in which Barack Obama’s passport files were penetrated three times this year.

The State Department announced on March 20 that two State Department contractors were fired and a third disciplined for accessing Obama’s files. Based on preliminary information, it was unclear what the motive of the Obama search was.

Read on.

The Road to 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'

By Jason Leopold
March 20, 2008

The Iraq War, which was predicated on the existence of weapons of mass destruction and fear of another 9/11, has resulted in the deaths of nearly 4,000 U.S. troops and has cost taxpayers roughly half-a-trillion dollars. (Estimates of Iraqi dead range into the hundreds of thousands.)

Yet, the invasion of Iraq was conceived prior to 9/11, according to Paul O'Neill, President Bush's first Treasury Secretary. In the book, The Price of Loyalty, journalist Ron Suskind interviewed O'Neill who said that the Iraq War was planned just days after the president was sworn into office.

Read on.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Obama's Greater Challenge

By Brent Budowsky
March 19, 2008

What Obama can now do is take the debate on racial injustice to a powerfully transforming level that reaches across all racial and religious divisions and gives voice to the voiceless, respect to the disrespected and power to the powerless.

Read on.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Iraq War as War Crime (Part Two)

By Robert, Sam and Nat Parry
March 19, 2008

Despite the stiffer-than-expected resistance, the U.S. military continued to blast its way toward its goal of toppling Saddam Hussein.

From the first days of the war, that violence took a heavy toll on Iraq’s civilians, though the bloody images were often sanitized from the American broadcasts so as not to dampen the war enthusiasm and depress the TV ratings.

Read on.

Monday, March 17, 2008

Iraq War as War Crime (Part One)

By Robert, Sam and Nat Parry
March 18, 2008

Iraq’s “Day of Liberation” – as George W. Bush called it – was supposed to begin with a bombardment consisting of 3,000 U.S. missiles delivered over 48 hours, 10 times the number of bombs dropped during the first two days of the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

Officials, who were briefed on the plans, said the goal was to so stun the Iraqis that they would simply submit to the overwhelming force demonstrated by the U.S. military. Administration officials dubbed the strategy “shock and awe.”

Read on.

Ex-US Attorney Cites GOP Voter Abuse

By Jason Leopold
March 17, 2008

The Justice Department issued a directive to every U.S. Attorney in the country to find and prosecute cases of voter fraud in their states during the height of hotly contested elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006, even though evidence of such abuses was extremely thin or non-existent, a former federal prosecutor says in a new book.

David Iglesias, the former U.S. attorney for New Mexico, recalled receiving an e-mail in late summer 2002 from the Department of Justice suggesting "in no uncertain terms" that U.S. attorneys should immediately begin working with local and state election officials "to offer whatever assistance we could in investigating and prosecuting voter fraud cases," Iglesias writes in his forthcoming.

Read on.

Viewing Iraq 'Winter Soldier' Testimony

By Jeff Cohen
March 17, 2008

In anguished presentations, the vets painstakingly described the horrors against Vietnamese they’d seen or taken part in. And the attitudes of racism and bloodlust that motored the war.

Read on.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Clinton's Child-Health Hype

By Robert Parry
March 17, 2008

A centerpiece of Hillary Clinton’s case for her candidacy – that she rebounded from the disaster of her health-care plan in 1994 to help enact a popular state-by-state program for children’s health insurance three years later – looks to be largely a fabrication.

At most, Clinton appears to have been a quiet supporter within her husband’s White House for the so-called S-CHIP program, which was fashioned through bipartisan compromise in the U.S. Senate against initial Clinton administration opposition.

Read on.

St. Patrick's Day & Irish Resistance

By Daniel Patrick Welch
March 16, 2008

But it needn't be so. The holiday offers up an incredible opportunity to expose children (and adults, of course) to the history of struggle of a courageous people -- England's first and last colony -- and, by extension, to shed light on the legacy of colonization and imperialism and the universal nature of popular resistance.

Read on.

'Neck Deep,' Iraq War & Campaign '08

By Robert Parry
March 16, 2008

The old saying about history – that those who ignore it are doomed to repeat it – has rarely been truer than in Campaign 2008.

The U.S. news media again flits from one political flap to the next, making “character” judgments about candidates based on trivial matters while missing what really matters.

Read on.