Saturday, August 22, 2009

CIA: Osama Helped Bush in '04

By Robert Parry
August 22, 2009 (Originally posted July 4, 2006)

On Oct. 29, 2004, just four days before the U.S. presidential election, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden released a videotape denouncing George W. Bush. Some Bush supporters quickly spun the diatribe as “Osama’s endorsement of John Kerry.” But behind the walls of the CIA, analysts had concluded the opposite: that bin Laden was trying to help Bush gain a second term.

Read on.

Friday, August 21, 2009

Lockerbie Doubts

By Lisa Pease
August 21, 2009

In any kind of major transnational event, there is the historical truth, what actually happened, and the political truth, what must have happened for the nations involved to continue on as before.

Read on.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Blackwater's Unwritten Death Contract

By Ray McGovern
August 20, 2009

Hats off to Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times for reporting that it was after CIA Director Leon Panetta’s holdover lieutenants finally told him that, under President Bush, they had farmed out assassinations to their Blackwater subsidiary, that he abruptly stopped the project and told Congress.

Read on.

Tom DeLay Stomps Woodstock Nation

By Michael Winship
August 20, 2009

A sorry state of affairs. If it wasn't for all the 40th anniversary celebrations of Woodstock, the primary cultural contribution of the month would be the announcement that former Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas will be a contestant in the next round of “Dancing with the Stars.”

Read on.

The Republican Ayatollahs

By David Swanson
August 20, 2009

You gotta keep 'em separated. My colleagues over at Velvet Revolution noticed a striking resemblance between certain Republican senators here at home and certain theocrats over yonder in Iran.

Read on.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Robert Novak Was a Liar

By Robert Parry
August 19, 2009

Washington’s punditocracy is in mourning over the death of right-wing columnist Robert Novak, with many warm remembrances about his outsized personality and his supposed love of reporting. But Novak often served as a dishonest propagandist and would have been condemned in a healthy journalistic world.

Read on.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Why the Right's Propaganda Works

By Robert Parry
August 19, 2009

Many on the Left are blaming President Barack Obama and middle-of-the-road Democrats for maneuvering health-care reform into a fast-approaching head-on collision. And some of that criticism is well deserved for foolishly letting Republicans get their hands on the wheel at all.

Read on.

A Power Equal to a Thousand Words

By David Kasper
August 18, 2009

It may be that President Obama and those who surround him are fighting a losing battle in their effort to conceal and leave behind us the crimes of the Bush era.

Read on.

Monday, August 17, 2009

PanAm 103 Verdict: Justice or Politics?

By William Blum
August 18, 2009

The newspapers were filled with pictures of happy relatives of the victims of the 1988 bombing of PanAm 103.

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Fromme-Peltier: Inequality of Mercy

By Dennis Bernstein and Miguel Gavalan Molina
August 18, 2009

Child protégé and Manson cheerleader Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme walked free last week, straight through the front doors of Fort Worth Federal Prison, into a brilliant Texas sun.

Read on.

Iraq War's Winners and Losers

By Sherwood Ross
August 17, 2009

“On my last day in Iraq,” veteran McClatchy News correspondent Leila Fadel wrote August 9, “as on my first day in Iraq, I couldn’t see what the United States and its allies had accomplished. … I couldn’t understand what thousands of American soldiers had died for and why hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had been killed.”

Read on.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

WTimes' Hypocritical Obama-Nazi Slur

By Robert Parry
August 17, 2009

One of the ugly ironies in the Right’s depiction of President Barack Obama as Hitler and health reform as a plan for Nazi-style euthanasia is that the owner of the Washington Times, which has pushed this line of attack, has longstanding ties with World War II-era Nazis, neo-Nazis and rightist “death squads.”

Read on.