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Most of the fawning corporate media (FCM) coverage of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s resignation Monday was even more bereft of context than usual.
It was as if Musharraf looked out the window and said, “It’s a beautiful day. I think I’ll resign and go fishing.”
In a letter written in 1648, the Swedish statesman, Axel Oxenstierna, chancellor to both King Gustavus Adolphus and Queen Christina, counseled, “Know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed.”
The fighting between Russia and the former Soviet republic of Georgia is an unnerving reminder of that, and of how quickly the balance of global power can be tilted from unexpected directions with barely a warning.
The conflict between the nations of Georgia and Russia, which grew very hot last week, has very long historical roots and has been potentially ready to explode since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The comments of John McCain on the recent outbreak of war has demonstrated the close connection between “sounding strong” for domestic political considerations and “being stupid” in the execution of American foreign policy.
“The goal is to defeat Obama,” author Jerome Corsi said in a telephone interview. “I don’t want Obama to be in office.”
Books used to be written to educate, inspire, or entertain. These days they are written to serve as political weapons. And the intellectual standards of book publishers appear to have been degraded significantly.
Millions of Americans who watched Barack Obama and then John McCain respond to nearly identical questions from evangelical minister Rick Warren were surely impressed by McCain’s quick and sharp answers. Supposedly he had been in a “cone of silence” while Obama was getting grilled during the preceding hour.
However, as it turned out, TV viewers and other Americans were misled. McCain had not been in any “cone of silence” shielding him from hearing Warren’s questions and Obama’s answers.
As Campaign 2008 unfolds, it is increasingly clear that the Republicans are a party with little left but hate, anger and the politics of slandering their opponent.
John McCain has become a candidate reduced to doing a Karl Rove imitation as a sleazy, divisive campaigner, while making bellicose pronouncements about war reminiscent of the childish Confederates at the beginning of “Gone With the Wind,” drinking their brandy and smoking their cigars with fantasies about the glorious war that they hunger to fight.
Dear Colin,
You have said you regret the “blot” on your record caused by your parroting spurious intelligence at the U.N. to justify war on Iraq. On the chance you may not have noticed, I write to point out that you now have a unique opportunity to do some rehab on your reputation.
On Tuesday, the sub-head for the Washington Post’s lead editorial read, “The West confronts an unfamiliar sight: a nation bent on conquest.”
The nation in question, of course, was Russia and the “conquest” was its border clash with neighboring Georgia over two breakaway provinces that want to join the Russian Federation.
What is the responsibility of reporters, editors and publishers when a candidate for high office is the target of a campaign of attack and personal destruction employing the systematic use of lies, smears, innuendo and character assassination?
J'accuse: What is happening in the 2008 general election is that Senator McCain has (literally) hired highest level operatives who worked for George Bush and Karl Rove (this is simply a fact) and is employing the carbon copy tactics that Rove used against his political opponents (including McCain himself).
It’s touching how American neoconservatives who have no regard for international law when they want to invade some troublesome country have developed a sudden reverence for national sovereignty.
Apparently, context is everything. So, the United States attacking Grenada or Nicaragua or Panama or Iraq or Serbia is justified even if the reasons sometimes don’t hold water or don’t hold up before the United Nations, The Hague or other institutions of international law.
The fighting between Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, has calmed down for the time being, but the deadly conflict continues to reverberate.
The Washington Post’s ombudsman says the newspaper’s original source for a quote that was used to portray Barack Obama as a megalomaniac now disputes the Post’s negative interpretation that has spread across cable TV, the Internet and even into a John McCain attack ad.
Post ombudsman Deborah Howell also acknowledges that neither Post reporter who relied on the misleading quote spoke directly with the source, checked out its accuracy, or made any independent effort to determine the context of the remark, which was made to a closed Democratic caucus meeting on Capitol Hill on July 29.
Anyone can champion the Earth when it's easy, yet too many remain silent when it's hard.
The forces behind oil are taking charge in the great energy debate – and the issue of global warming has virtually disappeared from the political campaign, with barely a word from its strongest advocate.
ABC News’ political blog, “The Note,” points out this week that Paris Hilton is issuing policy statements while John McCain nominates his wife for a topless beauty contest. The world’s turned upside down.
Who could blame a person for thinking that chronicling such oddness is beyond the skills of simple journalists? This is a job for the novelists.
The U.S. military commission’s split guilty verdict on Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, has drawn praise from the Bush administration and criticism from civil rights groups, but what has been overlooked is the chilling message that “the Hamdan principle” sends about future prosecutions in the “war on terror.”
This new principle holds that anyone – regardless of how tangential a connection to actual acts of terrorism – can be prosecuted through the kangaroo court of the military commissions and be sentenced to a long prison term (or even death). Though Hamdan is a Yemeni, the principle would seem to apply to U.S citizens, too.
John McCain, who once was regarded as a top Republican ally of the environmental movement, has embraced an energy plan nearly identical to Vice President Dick Cheney’s National Energy Policy, which was drafted largely by industry executives and which pushed their desire for more oil drilling and nuclear power.
Now echoing those views, McCain declares repeatedly, “We need to drill here and we need to drill now.” Beyond opening up large tracts of protected coastal waters for oil exploration, McCain has called for a massive expansion of nuclear power.
It might seem unlikely that the United States would elect John McCain to succeed George W. Bush when that would ensure continuation of many unpopular Bush policies: an ill-defined war with the Muslim world, right-wing consolidation of the U.S. Supreme Court, a drill-oriented energy strategy, tax cuts creating massive federal deficits, etc., etc.
But there are reasons – beyond understandable concerns about Barack Obama’s limited experience – that make a McCain victory possible, indeed maybe probable.
Many opponents of the Bush administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq have always argued that this conflict is an irrelevant and even counterproductive sideshow to the real "war on terrorism" in Afghanistan.
In fact, Barack Obama led the parade to initiate a troop surge in Afghanistan after having opposed it in Iraq. The more hawkish John McCain, not to be outdone by a weak-kneed Democrat, proposed that even more troops be sent to Afghanistan.
The scene of John McCain – during the anthrax attacks in October 2001 – opining to David Letterman that Iraq might be responsible underscores McCain’s central role in what may go down as one of the biggest strategic blunders in U.S. military history, the premature pivot from Afghanistan to Iraq.
Not only has it been clear for many years that McCain’s speculation about Iraq’s role in the anthrax attacks was reckless – made even more apparent by the FBI now pinning the crime on dead U.S. bio-defense scientist Bruce Ivins – but McCain also told Letterman in that Oct. 18, 2001, interview that “the second phase is Iraq.”
Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will face new legal jeopardy when the Justice Department’s Inspector General issues his next report on how the Bush administration let politics influence prosecutorial judgments, says ex-U.S. Attorney David Iglesias.
That installment is expected to address the firings of nine U.S. Attorneys in 2006 and could set the stage for criminal charges against Gonzales and his former deputy, Paul McNulty, according to Iglesias, the former U.S. Attorney for New Mexico who was one of those fired in the purge.
Like the largesse he spread so bountifully to members of Congress and the White House staff -- countless fancy meals, skybox tickets to basketball games and U2 concerts, golfing sprees in Scotland -- Jack Abramoff is the gift that keeps on giving.
The notorious lobbyist and his cohorts (including conservatives Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed) shook down Native American tribal councils and other clients for tens of millions of dollars, buying influence via a coalition of equally corrupt government officials and cronies dedicated to dismantling government by selling it off, making massive profits as they tore the principles of a representative democracy to shreds.
At this pivotal moment in American history, the major U.S. news media is back to its old game of drawing sweeping character judgments about a presidential candidate based on misleading “quotes,” a sickening replay of other recent elections.
The latest example of this wearisome gamesmanship was a column by the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, who distorted a reported quote from Sen. Barack Obama at a closed Democratic caucus and used it to prove Obama was a “presumptuous nominee.”
John McCain personally told Larry King that Barack Obama wanted to bring reporters, cameras and campaign aides to a meeting with wounded troops in Germany.
When he said this, John McCain was lying. Let me spell this correctly: L-Y-I-N-G.
Over the past several weeks, John McCain and his backers have touted his early endorsement of the Iraq War “surge” as evidence of his political courage, but it could be equally viewed as an act of political desperation, to forestall total calamity in Iraq and to avert disaster for broader neoconservative objectives in the Middle East.
McCain’s endorsement of the “surge” in January 2007 also represented a repudiation of his previous support for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s concept of using a light force of mobile U.S. troops, backed by technology and air power, to win the war.
The man who used to be John McCain is reacting to the pressures of a campaign by becoming Meat Ax McCain with low-road attacks that raise core questions of presidential temperament.
On Monday, as Barack Obama hosted a meeting with financial leaders from across America, the anger-ridden, increasingly desperate McCain campaign accused Obama of creating a future depression.
The headline atop Saturday’s op-ed page was a hallowed standby for the New York Times: “Americans Move to the Middle.”
Assembled by Times “visual columnist” Charles Blow, the text of the column was dwarfed by 15 graphs tracking recent movement in American public opinion, based on Gallup polls. There was one problem: the headline totally distorted the data.
For six years, with few exceptions, the Washington press corps has been cheerleading for the Iraq War – and the pattern is continuing in Campaign 2008 with the endless demands that Barack Obama apologize for not supporting the troop “surge.”
On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” NBC’s Tom Brokaw became the latest Big Media star to hector Obama about his opposition to George W. Bush’s troop “surge,” which the U.S. press corps and Republican John McCain credit with reducing violence in Iraq.
On his world tour, Barack Obama spent less than an hour in Palestine compared to 32 hours in Israel, prompting some Arab commentators to talk about the old U.S. political tilt toward Israel.
Before leaving office George W. Bush will issue a mass pardon, the largest collection of presidential pardons in American history.
Bush will pardon himself, Vice President Cheney, and a long list of officials involved in torture, eavesdropping, destruction of evidence, the CIA leak case, and a range of other potential crimes.
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee reminded everyone that rules barred personal attacks on George W. Bush during Friday’s hearing on his presidential abuses, but they didn’t feel obliged to forego the lashing of a favorite whipping boy, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
In a continuation of what has amounted to a five-year campaign to destroy Wilson’s reputation, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, flourished two pieces of evidence that supposedly showed that Wilson was a perjurer and that President Bush was right all along when he accused Iraq of seeking yellowcake uranium from Niger.
At one point during the five and a half years John McCain spent as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, he was tortured and beaten so badly he tried to kill himself.
After four days of this brutality, he gave in and agreed to make a false confession, telling lies to end the unbearable pain.
President George W. Bush’s Iraq War troop “surge,” which is now ending, got a mixed report card from congressional investigators, who found that many of Bush’s stated goals remain unmet.
The Government Accountability Office reported that violence in Iraq has dropped over the past year, but that the training of Iraqi security forces still lags, Sunni insurgents have not been defeated, cease-fires with Shiite militias are fragile, and political reconciliation has not been achieved.
Former White House political adviser Karl Rove, who has refused to appear before the House Judiciary Committee, ran an end-around against Democratic leaders by having his denial of sponsoring a political prosecution inserted into the Congressional Record by a senior Republican.
Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the committee’s ranking Republican, submitted a written question-and-answer exchange with Rove in which the political strategist said he played no role in the controversial prosecution of Alabama’s former Democratic Gov. Don Siegelman.
John McCain, presumably advised by Karl Rove and definitely imitating the politics of George Bush, is now saying that Barack Obama would rather lose a war than lose an election.
This is a defamation; this is a slander; this is a lie. McCain should apologize to Obama.
After having begun a series of investigative stories criticizing the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in May 2008, CNN reporter Drew Griffin reports being placed with more than a million other names on TSA’s swollen terrorism watch list.
Although TSA insists Griffin’s name is not on the list and pooh-poohs any possibility of retaliation for Griffin’s negative reporting, the reporter has been hassled by various airlines on 11 flights since May. The airlines insist that Griffin’s name is on the list.
John McCain has denounced Barack Obama as being “completely wrong” on Iraq, but it was McCain who advocated what turned out to be the fundamental strategic blunder in the post-9/11 conflicts, the hasty – and premature – pivot from Afghanistan to Iraq.
Only weeks after the Taliban were routed from Kabul and the remnants of al-Qaeda had fled from bases in Tora Bora, McCain took the lead in urging the Bush administration to turn its attention toward Iraq.
A conservative-dominated U.S. Appeals Court has opened the door for President George W. Bush or a successor to throw American citizens – as well as non-citizens – into a legal black hole by designating them “enemy combatants,” even if they have engaged in no violent act and are living on U.S. soil.
The federal Appeals Court in Richmond, Virginia, ruled 5-4 on July 15 that Bush had the right, while prosecuting the “war on terror,” to hold Qatari citizen (and Peoria, Illinois, resident) Ali al-Marri indefinitely as an “enemy combatant.”
One can assume that former Attorney General John Ashcroft didn’t mean it to be funny, but his testimony on Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee might strike one as hilarious, were it not for the issue at hand — torture.
Ashcroft is the Attorney General who approved torture before he disapproved it, but committee members spared him accusations of flip-flopping.
Once again we're closing the barn door after the horse is out and gone.
In Washington, the Federal Reserve has finally acted to stop some of the predatory lending that exploited people’s need for money.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s call for a timetable on American troop withdrawals has touched off a dramatic change in the debate over the future U.S. engagement in Iraq – essentially, it marks a falling away of the fig-leaf rationales for the five-plus years of occupation.
As these fig leaves drop to the ground, they are exposing raw geo-strategic objectives that were present in the original calculations of Republican foreign policy experts going back to the early 1990s, a desire for a firm U.S. foothold in the Middle East to protect the West's access to oil and to defend the state of Israel from, then, primarily its Arab enemies.
Rebuffing Dennis Kucinich’s calls for impeachment hearings on George W. Bush, the House Judiciary Committee instead will hear testimony about Bush’s “imperial presidency” and several of his administration’s scandals.
In a press release issued Thursday, Rep. John Conyers, House Judiciary Committee chairman, said his panel will explore a variety of Bush controversies, including manipulation of prewar Iraq intelligence, politicization of the Justice Department, and refusal to cooperate with congressional investigations.
In the latest twist in the “Plame-gate” scandal, President George W. Bush has asserted executive privilege to block release of Vice President Dick Cheney’s interview with a special prosecutor about possible criminal violations in the leaking of a CIA officer’s covert identity.
Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, promptly denounced the White House legal reasoning as “ludicrous,” noting that executive privilege covers advice that an aide gives the President, not responses to legal questions posed by a prosecutor about a possible crime.
You say you expected more rhetoric than reality from Senators Obama and McCain in their speeches about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Well, that’s certainly what you got.
What I find nonetheless amazing is how they, and the pundits, have taken such little notice of the dramatic change in the political landscape occasioned by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s bombshell on July 7 — his insistence on a “timetable” for withdrawal of U.S. troops before any accord is reached on their staying past the turn of the year.
Most Americans who have followed the twists and turns of the Iraq War would agree that George W. Bush misled the nation into the conflict with false claims about WMD and Saddam Hussein’s links to al-Qaeda. But it’s less understood that Bush never stopped deceiving the public.
Indeed, one of President Bush’s favorite lines – telling the American people to listen to what the enemy says and thus to know that al-Qaeda considers Iraq the “central front” in the “war on terror” – has been every bit as misleading as his earlier false assertions about WMD.
Iran does not intend to build a nuclear bomb, unless it is confronted with an external threat, according to Muhammad Sahimi, the National Iranian Oil Company chair in petroleum engineering and a professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Read on.George W. Bush, who has expanded his power to access the e-mails and other electronic communications of Americans, is resisting congressional demands that White House e-mails be saved for later research by historians.
Bush signaled he would veto a House-passed bill that seeks to overhaul the Presidential and Federal Records Act to ensure that e-mails and other government documents are preserved in the age of the Internet.
Even Sen. Charles Schumer, whose vote last year ensured Michael Mukasey’s confirmation as Attorney General, was left sputtering as Mukasey returned the favor by rebuffing Schumer’s concerns about the Bush administration’s political prosecutions.
At the end of his round of Senate Judiciary Committee questions, Schumer referred to allegations that White House political adviser Karl Rove had pressed for the selective prosecution of Alabama’s Democratic Gov. Don Siegelman, who was viewed as a threat to Republican dominance of the South.
The great issue in 2008 is the public sense that events are out of control, that we drift deeper into dangerous waters while our leaders lack the clarity or courage to act.
This is the security gap. It spreads across the landscape of American civic life. Our military has suffered a decade of damage through disastrous execution of an unwise war, without the trumpet that summons Americans to fully join the mission.
Read on.A popular Washington saying holds that “politics is about the future, not the past.” Regrettably, that often translates into sweeping serious wrongdoing under the rug in the name of “looking to the future” – a mistake the Democrats appear poised to make again in approving a new wiretapping law.
What infuriates the Democratic “base” and many other Americans about this “compromise” bill is not only that it grants the President powers beyond the narrow technological fixes that were initially cited, but that it sanctions a cover-up of George W. Bush’s past abuses of power.
Ray Hunt, the Texas oil man who landed a controversial oil production deal with Iraq’s Kurdistan regional government, has enjoyed close political and business ties with Vice President Dick Cheney dating back a decade – and to the Bush family since the 1970s.
Despite those longstanding connections – and Hunt’s work for George W. Bush as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board – the Bush administration expressed surprise when Hunt Oil signed the agreement last September.
The U.S.-supported occupation violence against Palestine continues unchecked. The failure of major Western politicians and the Big Press to cover the story has given Israel an absolute free hand to prosecute its program of ethnic cleansing.
It is nearly impossible these days to get substantial, unbiased information out on punishing Israeli policies. The few reporters who have chosen to take on the story head-on oftentimes risk their life and their limbs to do their work.
At the beginning of the week, a friend sent me a scurrilous, anonymous e-mail attacking Barack Obama that has been circulating around her elderly cousin’s Jewish senior living community in New Jersey.
Headlined “Something to Think About,” it lists 13 acts of assassination, kidnapping, war and terrorism, all of which, it notes, were committed “by Muslim male extremists between the ages of 17 and 40.”
The first Guantanamo Bay “enemy combatant” review case to go before a federal appeals court has offered a peek down the rabbit hole of capricious irrationality that underlies George W. Bush’s “war on terror.”
The rabbit-hole analogy follows a three-judge panel comparing the Bush administration’s assertion of “evidence” to the writings of Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
Read on.Our mid-year fundraiser is off to a slow start. So far we’ve raised only $2,000 toward our goal of $40,000.
I realize times are tough – and there are plenty of financial demands on everyone – but sadly a big part of the reason for the mess we’re in is that the American people were not armed with the information they needed to make sound judgments at key moments.
Simply put, those of us who tried to tell the truth were out-gunned by powerful interests who had the money to spread lies and propaganda.
As historians ponder George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, they may wonder how Republicans perfected a propaganda system that could fool tens of millions of Americans, intimidate Democrats, and transform the vaunted Washington press corps from watchdogs to lapdogs.
To understand this extraordinary development, historians might want to look back at the 1980s and examine the Iran-Contra scandal’s “lost chapter,” a narrative describing how Ronald Reagan’s administration brought CIA tactics to bear domestically to reshape the way Americans perceived the world.
Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn't a war about oil. That's cynical and simplistic, they said. It's about terror and al Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction.
But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire and ashes. And now the bottom turns out to be....the bottom line. It is about oil.
Mixing haughty disdain with semantic quibbling, two key legal architects behind George W. Bush’s “war on terror” tactics brushed aside congressional questions about how the administration fashioned its harsh interrogation policies that human rights experts say crossed the line into torture.
Former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo and Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington also downplayed their roles in formulating the theories of presidential power that gave Bush wide latitude to order that detainees be subjected to painful treatment to break them down.
All over the world down through history, political leaders who have engaged in torture and other grotesque crimes of state have justified their actions as necessary to protect their governments or their people or themselves.
It was true when England’s King Edward I had William Wallace – “Braveheart” – drawn and quartered in 1305 for resisting the crown’s rule in Scotland, and a gruesome death was what King George III foresaw for America’s Founding Fathers in 1776 when they stood up to his abuses in the Colonies.
Read on.America should mobilize to mass-produce, within five years, a “patriot car” that achieves 100 miles per gallon or runs on entirely gasoline-free fuels.
The next president should issue a call to action and a moon shot-magnitude program to enlist all Americans to a new generation of technology, science and research leadership, similar to JFK reaching the moon within a decade.
Campaign 2008 could well be the hinge that swings open the door to the future of the American Republic – and arguably to the survival of the planet – or it may slam the door shut. (To do the work necessary to cover this historic election, we at Consortiumnews.com need your help.)
While the choice between Barack Obama and John McCain is surely not a perfect one – both candidates have weaknesses and strengths – they nevertheless represent clear choices on crucial questions about how a Republic must function and how America should approach the world.
If the United States does not act soon to address health-care costs, federal and state governments as well as American businesses could face a cascading fiscal crisis with devastating long-term consequences, says a new report by the Government Accountability Office.
In the report entitled, “Long Term Federal Fiscal Challenge Driven Primarily by Health Care,” the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, said an immediate “multi-pronged solution” must be pursued before the “window of opportunity” to address the issue closes.
Barack Obama’s decision to opt out of federal campaign financing has riled newspaper editorialists, TV pundits and even some progressives who view regulating “money in politics” as the silver bullet to kill the special-interest domination of Washington.
But the fury over Obama’s choice to rely on his Internet-based small donors – rather than take nearly $85 million in federal funding – misses a difficult truth that may be especially heretical on the Left: campaign-finance reform has been, by and large, a failure.
There was real emotion in his voice when ABC News anchor Charles Gibson used Friday night’s newscast to stand up for little-guy McCain against online-fundraising-powerhouse Barack Obama.
By opting out of public financing, Gibson intoned, the Democrat could obtain “two times, three times, four times, as much money as John McCain.”
In November 2006 when Democrats won control of Congress for the first time in 12 years, Rep. Nancy Pelosi explained the significance behind the record voter turnout that helped shift the balance of power in Washington.
“People voted for change and they voted for Democrats who will take our country in a new direction,” Pelosi said during a victory speech in San Francisco on Nov. 8, 2006.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claims that a key positive feature of the new wiretap “compromise” is that the bill reaffirms that the President must follow the law, even though the same bill virtually assures that no one will be held accountable for George W. Bush's violation of the earlier spying law.
In other words, in the guise of rejecting Bush’s theories of an all-powerful presidency that is above the law, the Democratic leadership cleared the way for the President and his collaborators to evade punishment for defying the law.
Read on.It’s crazy, but it’s coming soon – from the same folks who brought us Iraq.
Unlike the attack on Iraq five years ago, to deal with Iran there need be no massing of troops. And, with the propaganda buildup already well under way, there need be little, if any, forewarning before shock and awe and pox – in the form of air and missile attacks – begin.
Public reception to the last European tour of Bush's presidency was less than warm in the UK earlier this week.
Read on.The Bush administration built a legal framework – relying on semantics and secrecy – to subject detainees at Guantanamo Bay to brutal interrogation techniques and then to hide the reality from human rights observers, according to internal government documents.
The documents, made public by the Senate Armed Services Committee, undercut assertions by President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior administration officials who have blamed cruel treatment of detainees on "a few bad apples" who acted on their own.
Bernstein: Let’s cut to the quick and tell us what you see as being at the core of your call to impeach the President and the Vice President.
Kucinich: An attempt to destroy constitutional governance by violating numerous constitutional provisions, U.S. code and international law, taking us into a war based on lies, making a false case for the war, saying falsely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that it had the intention of attacking the United States, that there was a readiness to imminently attack, pursuing policies of torture, illegal detention, wiretapping, spying, rendition. I mean, there’s…you know these articles…
Read on.A House committee has subpoenaed FBI transcripts of interviews with President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney regarding their possible roles in the exposure of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson.
Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, issued on Monday to Attorney General Michael Mukasey in the latest chapter of a standoff over what Bush and Cheney told a special prosecutor about the case in 2004.
Read on.It was nineteen years ago this week that I.F. (Izzy) Stone died. The legendary blogger was 81.
Confused? You say he died years before web blogs were invented?
Five years ago this month, an extraordinary battle was taking shape in the shadows of official Washington: a former U.S. ambassador was preparing to go public to challenge a central deception used by the White House to justify invading Iraq – and the Bush administration was readying a fierce counterattack against him.
Now, after many nasty clashes – which led to the exposure of a covert CIA officer, a criminal White House cover-up, a special prosecutor investigation, the conviction of a senior aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and a subsequent presidential commutation – one key administration insider finally has agreed to testify before Congress.
