Wednesday, June 17, 2009
CIA Secret File Tests Obama's Pledge
June 18, 2009
President Barack Obama’s promise of a more open government faces a new test this week as his administration weighs whether to release details of a May 2004 internal CIA report about the agency’s use of torture, including how at least three detainees were killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Read on.
Flawed Elections: US and Iran
June 17, 2009
The Right has been bashing President Obama for not calling the Iranian elections a fraud. Perhaps Obama understands that you can’t tell someone to fix a problem you haven’t first fixed in your own house.
Read on.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Rev. Moon, North Korea & the Bushes
June 16, 2009 (Originally posted Oct. 11, 2000)
The Rev. Sun Myung Moon's business empire, which includes the conservative Washington Times, paid millions of dollars to North Korea's communist leaders in the early 1990s when the hard-line government needed foreign currency to finance its weapons programs, according to U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency documents.
Read on.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Taking a Rational Look at Iran
June 15, 2009
One election in Iran will not significantly change U.S.-Iran relations — only a change in U.S. thinking and policy will do so.
Read on.
What If Ahmadinejad Really Won?
June 15, 2009
It’s fast congealing into conventional wisdom that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole re-election through fraud and that the so-called “green revolution” of Mir-Hossein Mousavi – which was based in the country’s intelligentsia and middle class – got robbed.
Read on.
Extremism and Suffering Children
June 15, 2009
What does a shootout at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., the confessions of a Khmer Rouge jailer and the murder of a Kansas medical doctor have in common? The answer is “children,” and how they suffer from being targeted and used by extremists to advance their own hateful agendas.
Read on.
Excusing Outrages of the Right
June 15, 2009
Part of America’s ongoing political crisis is that Official Washington remains cowed by the angry Right, even as it engages in subtle and not-so-subtle appeals to bigotry and invitations to violence. As the outrages mount, most of the national press corps prefers to look the other way, a pattern that now stretches back many years.
Read on.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
'Emergent Church' v. Fundamentalism
June 13, 2009
Three weeks ago I wrote a column about the emergent churches in America. I wrote the column as a report, not as an opinion. I credited Professor Scott McKnight of North Park University in Chicago and cited his eight characteristics of the emergent church.
Read on.
The Silence About Guns
June 13, 2009
You know by now that in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, an elderly white supremacist and anti-Semite named James W. von Brunn allegedly walked into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with a .22-caliber rifle and killed a security guard before being brought down himself.
Read on.Friday, June 12, 2009
Computer Piloting & Air France Crash
June 12, 2009
How the Air France Flight 447’s Airbus A330 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean remains a mystery, but what is known is that Airbus’ heavy reliance on computerized piloting has a history of some bizarre or unexplained crashes when the technology failed, misread the circumstances, or complicated efforts by human pilots to react to an emergency.
Read on.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Two Key Health-Care Numbers
June 11, 2009
To understand the financial stakes involved in the battle over U.S. health-care reform, it’s useful to keep two numbers in mind: 50 million and 119 million.
Obama Aids Bush's Torture Cover-up
June 11, 2009
By opposing release of photographic and other evidence of prisoner abuse, President Barack Obama is furthering a long-running cover-up that has protected senior Bush administration officials who set the harsh interrogation policies that led to torture and other misconduct.
Read on.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
GOP's Civil Liberties Hypocrisy
June 10, 2009 (Originally posted April 20, 2009)
Editor's Note: Amid a surge of right-wing terrorism and intimidation -- including the murder of a Kansas abortion doctor and a fatal assault on Washington's Holocaust Museum -- we are re-posting an article from April that examined the Republican fury over a Homeland Security report that warned of exactly such possibilities:
Just as Republicans have refashioned themselves as fiscal conservatives in the age of Obama, apparently forgetting that they allowed a budget surplus to be transformed into a record deficit while George W. Bush was President, they now seem to be taking up the cause of civil liberties – at least as far as right-wing groups are concerned.
Read on.
Tying Obama to Bush's Budget Mess
June 10, 2009
Some people say that George W. Bush didn’t solve any national problems during his eight years in office, but that’s not exactly right.
Read on.
America's Toxic 'Innocence'
June 10, 2009
Even as President Barrack Obama waxed eloquent in Cairo, Egypt, on the moral imperatives of the community of nations, public opinion polls released in the United States revealed that, by a substantial percentage, its citizens believe torture is an acceptable option for interrogation of suspects deemed terrorists by various U.S. governmental agencies.
Read on.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
CIA Shifts Reasons for Torture Secrets
June 10, 2009
Last month, the CIA told a federal court judge it could not abide by a court order and turn over detailed documents about the destruction of 92 interrogation videotapes because it would compromise the integrity of a special prosecutor’s criminal investigation into the matter.
Read on.
Obama's Era of Openness Is Closed
June 9, 2009
An “era” used to last, but not so much anymore. We’ve already heard GOP Chairman Michael Steele proclaim that “the era of apologizing for Republican mistakes” was over (when many of us didn’t know it had begun), and now it appears that Barack Obama’s era of openness has closed, too.
Read on.Monday, June 08, 2009
Al Qaeda Adjusts to Obama
June 8, 2009
Fearing a new, more formidable opponent than the often buffoonish and macho cowboy George W. Bush, the two leaders of al Qaeda have tag teamed Barack Obama with twin audiotapes condemning him.
Read on.
Bush/Cheney Pushed Torture on DOJ
June 8, 2009
In 2005, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales bent to demands from President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to push through new legal opinions sanctioning harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects, according to e-mails written by then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey.
Read on.
Two Colombian Generals Face Charges
June 8, 2009
Two Colombian generals, both of whom received training at the U.S. Army's "School of The Americas"(SOA) at Ft. Benning, Ga., have been accused by authorities there of crimes involving narcotics and collaborating with criminal paramilitary groups, according to a report in the June 15th issue of The Nation magazine.
Read on.Friday, June 05, 2009
Privatizing 'Obama's War'
June 5, 2009
The sudden reappearance of former Vice President Dick Cheney over the last few months - seeming to emerge from his famous undisclosed location more frequently now than he ever did when he was in office - does not mean six more weeks of winter.
Read on.
Obama Fuzzed Up Reality in Speech
June 5, 2009
President Barack Obama's speech in Cairo probably did a world of good. It was packed with noble sentiments and some truth-telling. But imagine how much more good would be done if all the best parts of it corresponded to reality.
Read on.
119 Million Americans Must Be Wrong
June 5, 2009
As the health insurance industry and its defenders in Congress lay out their case against permitting a public option in a reform bill, perhaps their most curious argument is that some 119 million Americans are ready to dump their private plans and jump to something more like Medicare – and that’s why the choice can’t be permitted.
Read on.
Thursday, June 04, 2009
Baucus Still Shuns Single-Payer Option
June 4, 2009
Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana, met Wednesday with advocates for single-payer healthcare, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, and told them that he might drop criminal charges against 13 people arrested for speaking up in his hearings, but that he would not include any supporters of single-payer health coverage in any future hearings.
Read on.
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Ronald Reagan: Worst President Ever?
June 3, 2009
There’s been talk that George W. Bush was so inept that he should trademark the phrase “Worst President Ever,” though some historians would bestow that title on pre-Civil War President James Buchanan. Still, a case could be made for putting Ronald Reagan in the competition.
Read on.The Intel-Journo Alliance
June 2, 2009
Amid all the recent negatives in the worlds of intelligence and journalism, one encouraging development has been the recognition of common ground between two beleaguered groups, honest U.S. intelligence analysts and honest American journalists, two groups that previously had been on opposite sides of the secrecy divide.
Read on.
Monday, June 01, 2009
Sunday, May 31, 2009
America's Political/Media Kabuki
June 1, 2009
Kabuki is defined as a highly stylized form of classical Japanese dance-drama in which actors often wear elaborate makeup and engage in precisely dictated movements, a useful metaphor for the current American political process which can’t seem to break out of old patterns even as the nation hurtles from crisis to crisis.
Read on.
Will Obama End 'War on Drugs'?
May 31, 2009
Efforts by President Obama to put an end to the nation’s failed “War on Drugs” can’t come an hour too soon – if that’s his intent. From his actions, it’s hard to know.
Read on.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Taking a Troubling Measure of Torture
May 30, 2009
In all the recent debate over torture, many of our Beltway pundits and politicians have twisted themselves into verbal contortions to avoid using the word at all.
Read on.
Friday, May 29, 2009
'Scaredy-Cat Nation' Risks US Security
May 29, 2009
Some Americans may think they’re looking tough by refusing to allow any Guantanamo Bay detainees to enter the United States, whether as prisoners to face trial or as people who were incorrectly swept up – like the Chinese Uighurs – and have been deemed no threat to U.S. security.
Read on.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Colin Powell: No Good Samaritan
May 28, 2009
Watching retired Gen. Colin Powell cite Jesus's parable of the Good Samaritan during Sunday’s Memorial Day ceremonies on the Mall in Washington, it struck me that Powell was giving hypocrisy a bad name.
Read on.
Fear Trumps Reason on Guantanamo
May 28, 2009
Unfortunately, politicians claim they don’t read opinion polls, while scrutinizing them even more closely than options for their next junket. This has been most evident recently in the civil liberties arena.
Read on.
Top Ten Ideas to Obama's Outreach
May 28, 2009
You might want to hurry because the open government is about to close. Participation in the "Brainstorming" phase 1 of President Obama's online Open Government Initiative only lasts from May 21st to May 28th.
Read on.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
The Audacity of Hopelessness
May 27, 2009
From time to time, events unfold that are so large in scope, so all-encompassing in their implications that one's initial response is muted by an inability to categorize it all within the realm of experience.
Read on.
Obama Caves to 'Scaredy-Cat Nation'
May 27, 2009
A paradox of the modern United States is that it wields unprecedented military power in the world yet its people are constantly kept frightened about unlikely foreign dangers. Its politics, too, are dominated by fear.
Read on.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
America's 'Emerging Church'
May 26, 2009
In the last half of the 20th century, Evangelicalism swept the American religious scene.
Read on.
The War on the Public Health Option
May 26, 1009
In 2003, a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama told a local AFL-CIO meeting, “I am a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program.”
Read on.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Colin Powell Skates on Torture
May 25, 2009
There is no one, it seems, that the U.S. mainstream news media loves more than Colin Powell, a “moderate” Republican who gives a careerist journalist the chance to do some smart positioning in the “center.” But the truth about this retired four-star general is that he is the ultimate careerist.
Read on.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Think Who Might Be 45th President
May 24, 2009
The United States has had 44 presidents and nobody knows who the 45th will be.
Read on.
After the Parades and the Picnics
May 24, 2009
Everybody loves a long weekend. But this year's Memorial Day ought to be a lot more meaningful to all of us. We need to see it as a chance to pray for lasting peace and for our President, that he may lead our country to a new vision.
Read on.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
On Death Row: Murder and Innocence
May 23, 2009
If you believe the claims of death row prisoner Kevin Cooper, that he is innocent, and that there are many reasons to do so, then the state of California should be brought up on charges of attempted murder and false imprisonment.
The Cheney Channel
May 23, 2009
An association representing top advertisers on broadcast and cable television has proposed the creation of a new Cheney Channel dedicated exclusively to the Cheney family, the primary motivation apparently being to get Dick and Liz off all the other channels where their presence seems to be hurting the sales of advertised products.
Read on.
The CIA's History of Deception
May 23, 2009
“Let me be clear about this,” CIA director Leon Panetta told his troops last week, “it was not CIA policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values.”
Read on.
Friday, May 22, 2009
The GOP's 'Era of Apologizing'
May 22, 2009
Republican National Chairman Michael Steele says, "the era of apologizing for Republican mistakes of the past is now officially over." But that must have been a very brief “era,” since it’s hard to remember any significant mistakes that the GOP has owned up to – except perhaps that George W. Bush wasn’t right-wing enough.
Read on.
Cheney Goofs on Israel
May 22, 2009
If we hear in the coming days that former Vice President Dick Cheney has fired one of his speechwriters — or perhaps grounded Lynne or Liz — it will be clear why.
Read on.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
NYT Helps the Bushies, Again
May 21, 2009
The New York Times, which helped sell the Iraq War with a bogus story about aluminum tubes for nuclear centrifuges and withheld evidence of illegal spying on Americans for more than a year, is again mishandling a sensitive story in a way that panders to the Right.
Read on.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
The Risk of Letting Ukraine into NATO
May 21, 2009
Of all the countries lining up to get under the United States’ protective shield in the NATO alliance, the Ukraine is the most important for the United States and Russia.
Read on.
Who to Trust -- Pelosi or the CIA?
May 20, 2009
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is under fire for complaining that the CIA misled her in classified briefings about the Bush administration’s abusive treatment of “war on terror” detainees. Republicans and many media pundits have accused Pelosi of scapegoating the CIA for her failure to protest those techniques in a timely fashion.
Read on.
Obama May Slide High Court to Right
May 20, 2009
I learned long ago, while working at the media watch group FAIR, to be wary of New York Times headlines.
Read on.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Obama's Warfare Budget
May 20, 2009
Although the United States is not in imminent danger of attack from any country, President Barack Obama’s first budget further expands the Pentagon’s already dominant global operations.
Read on.
Monday, May 18, 2009
How Torture Trapped Colin Powell
May 18, 2009
Four days before trying to sell the invasion of Iraq to the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell was ready to scrap dubious allegations about Saddam Hussein’s ties to al-Qaeda but was dissuaded by top CIA officials who cited a new “bombshell” that now appears to have been derived from torture, a top Powell aide says.
Read on.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Knowing 'What's Good for the Country'
May 17, 2009
When President Barack Obama reversed himself on releasing photos of U.S. soldiers abusing detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq, he offered the usual “patriotic” excuse, that the images might fuel anti-Americanism and cost the lives of U.S. soldiers.
Read on.
Responding to WP's Cohen on Torture
May 17, 2009
Richard Cohen ["What if Cheney's Right?" op- ed, May 12] started out on a high moral plane with the observation that "[t]orture is a moral abomination."
Read on.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Giving Some Love to the Inquisition
May 16, 2009
At a Senate hearing this past week, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, rallied to the defense of ex-President George W. Bush’s torture techniques by implicitly endorsing the Spanish Inquisition’s brutal treatment of Jews, Muslims, Protestants and other alleged heretics from the 15th to 17th centuries.
Friday, May 15, 2009
How Washington Misses the Joke
May 15, 2009
A joke is a sometime thing, as wide as a church door or as delicate as a rose. The right or wrong word, too many or too few, their placement or emphasis can determine whether it's a total dud or fall down funny; the difference, as Mark Twain said, between the lightning bug and lightning.
Read on.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Tortured Logic; Tortured Results
May 14, 2009
Each day the evidence piles up - highlighted by the unconvincing (and self-incriminating) rants of Dick Cheney.
Read on.
The Right Bullied Obama on Photos
May 14, 2009
In reversing an earlier commitment to release photos of U.S. soldiers abusing prisoners, President Barack Obama succumbed to a propaganda barrage unleashed by former Bush administration officials, their congressional allies, the right-wing news media and holdovers who retain key jobs under Obama.
Read on.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
'Impolite' Questions for Gen. Myers
May 13, 2009
Tuesday evening offered an unusual opportunity to question the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (2001-2005), Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, at an alumni club dinner.
Read on.
Murtha's Caring Corruption
May 13, 2009
Headline in the May 2 New York Times: "Murtha's Nephew Named a Lobbyist for Marines." Headline just three days later in the May 5 Washington Post: "Murtha's Nephew Got Defense Contracts."
Read on.
Obama, Pakistan and the Rule of Law
May 13, 2009
In the first hour of his administration President Barack Obama affirmed his dedication to the rule of law:
Read on.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
WPost Columnist Winks at Torture
May 12, 2009
These days, the Washington Post has the look of one of those Southern newspapers in the 1960s standing firm for segregation as the wave of civil rights swept across the region. Except for the Post, the blind commitment is to neoconservatism.
Read on.
Credit-Card Law Has Painful Impact
May 12, 2009
As Memorial Day arrives, veterans and military families will be victimized by continued credit card interest rate and fee hikes, and under the House-passed credit card bill, abuses will continue until next Memorial Day, because the effective date of the key provisions of the House bill is a year from enactment.
Read on.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Bloated Empire and the Financial Crisis
May 11, 2008
A few — and only a few — prescient commentators have questioned whether the U.S. can sustain its informal global empire in the wake of the most severe economic crisis since World War II. And the simultaneous quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan are leading more and more opinion leaders and taxpayers to this question.
Read on.
Saturday, May 09, 2009
Cheney Learned Iran-Contra Lessons
May 9, 2009
In a new article by Stephen "W.W. Beauchamp" Hayes, former Vice President Cheney gripes extensively about the Obama administration. It's exactly what you'd expect.
Read on.
Friday, May 08, 2009
Republicans Play a New Fear Card
May 9, 2009
The mean-spirited attitude of Republican politicians over repatriating Guantanamo’s remaining 241 inmates in the U.S. reflects both their irrational fears and loss of moral compass.
Read on.
'Central Front' in the Health-Care War
May 9, 2009
On May 5, eight health-care advocates, including myself and two other physicians, stood up to Sen. Max Baucus and the Senate Finance Committee during a “public roundtable discussion” with a simple question: Will you allow an advocate for a single-payer national health plan to have a seat at the table?
Read on.
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
Torture? Rudman to the Rescue
May 6, 2009
The announcement in mid-March that CIA Director Leon Panetta had picked former Sen. Warren Rudman to act as CIA “liaison” with the Senate Intelligence Committee during its “review” of interrogation and detention practices has drawn virtually no criticism from the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM).
Read on.
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
The Need to Hold the GOP Accountable
May 5, 2009
Perhaps it was the image of Jeb Bush expounding on the future of the Republican Party or Condoleezza Rice channeling her inner Richard Nixon with the imperial logic that “by definition, if it was authorized by the President, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.”
Read on.
Monday, May 04, 2009
Can the Neocons Jump to the Dems?
May 4, 2009
Neoconservatives used the Republican Party as a vehicle to promote and employ their policies of muscular nation-building overseas.
Read on.
The Iraq War's Other Contractors
May 4, 2009
The most impressive contracting effort of the Iraq War to date is not the shoveling of treasure to Halliburton, but rather the low-profile hiring of over 100,000 Sons of Iraq over the last two years to guard the towns, neighborhoods and highways of Iraq.
Read on.
'One More Bubble!'
May 4, 2009
When I took an editing job at Bloomberg News in March 2000, my arrival coincided with the bursting of the Internet bubble. As once-hot IPOs tanked and the Nasdaq crashed. I would joke to other editors that what the U.S. economy needed was “to build a better bubble.”
Read on.
Friday, May 01, 2009
WPost: All the Ex-President's Excuses
May 1, 2009
Under the stewardship of Fred Hiatt, the editorial and op-ed pages of the Washington Post have gradually moved to the right.
Read on.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Who Betrayed 'Objective' Journalism?
April 30, 2009
The mainstream U.S. news media often laments the decline of objective journalism, pointing disapprovingly at the more subjective news that comes from the Internet or from ideological programming whether Fox News on the Right or some MSNBC hosts on the Left.
Read on.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Memo to President Obama on Torture
April 29, 2009
This memorandum is VIPS’ first attempt to inform you on a major intelligence issue, as we did your predecessor; thus, some background might be helpful.
House Dems Seek Special Prosecutor
April 29, 2009
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and other committee Democrats formally have asked Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to probe and, “where appropriate, prosecute,” Bush administration officials for the torture of “war on terror” detainees.
Read on.
Grading Obama's First 100 Days
April 29, 2009
Attention always focuses on a President’s first 100 days. The media — and the rest of Washington — correctly realize that historically a President’s power is at its zenith during the honeymoon period following his inauguration to a first term.
Read on.
Should Dem Voters Accept Specter?
April 29, 2009
Most Pennsylvania Democrats are Democrats for good reasons. It is not because they like the letter “D’ more than the letter “R.” They are Democrats because they support the Democratic approach on a wide array of issues more than they support the Republican policy positions on those issues.
Read on.
Specter's JFK Specter
April 29, 2009
Given that Arlen Specter has decided to leave the Republican Party, I think it's worth examining Specter's history to see if he will be an asset or a burden for the Democratic Party.
Read on.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
What Should Obama Do?
April 26, 2009
President Obama is displaying ambivalence in handling the issue of torture and abuse. He clearly wants to do the right thing and, as a result, has put a stop to torture and closed down the CIA’s secret prisons where the worst abuses occurred.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Democrats' 'Battered Wife Syndrome'
April 25, 2009
In recent years, the Washington political dynamic has often resembled an abusive marriage, in which the bullying husband (the Republicans) slaps the wife and kids around, and the battered wife (the Democrats) makes excuses and hides the ugly bruises from outsiders to keep the family together.
Needed: Another Ferdinand Pecora
April 25, 2009
For policy wonks near and far, the celebrity of the hour isn't Susan Boyle, the Scottish church marm who belted out "I Dreamed a Dream" with the voice of an airy angel, or ex-Somali pirate hostage Richard Phillips, or Carrie Prejean, the Miss USA contestant from California who's against gay marriage because the Bible tells her so.
Read on.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Real World Reasons Against Torture
April 24, 2009
Back in December 2007, when I wrote "Torture is Wrong, Illegal and It Doesn't Work," I mentioned that "the FBI agent who reportedly had the best chance of foiling the 9/11 plot, Ali Soufan, the only Arabic-speaking agent in New York and one of only eight in the country, and who has since resigned from the FBI, could and should tell people the truth of how the CIA's tactics were counterproductive."
Read on.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Bush Team Ignored Waterboard Cases
April 23, 2009
George W. Bush’s Justice Department said subjecting a person to the near-drowning of waterboarding was not a crime and didn’t even cause pain, but Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department thought otherwise, prosecuting a Texas sheriff and three deputies for using the practice to get confessions.
Read on.
Torture-Spinning Punditry
April 23, 2009
While much of elite U.S. punditry is backing away from torture, Jeff Jacoby is claiming to have opposed it but to now find it excusable.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
How Bush's Torture Helped al-Qaeda
April 23, 2009
Captured al-Qaeda operatives, facing the threat or reality of torture, appear to have fed the Bush administration’s obsession about Iraq, buying Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders time to rebuild their organization inside nuclear-armed Pakistan.
Read on.
On Torture, the Pressure Builds
April 22, 2009
Well, well. The New York Times has finally put a story together on the key role that two controversial psychologists played in devising the Bush administration's torture policies. Guess we should be thankful for small favors.
Read on.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Obama's Tortured Stance on Torture
April 21, 2009
Although Barack Obama should be applauded for stopping torture by the U.S. government and pledging to close the infamous Guantanamo and worldwide CIA secret prisons, he is nevertheless playing politics with the issue to get the best of both worlds.
Read on.
Greedy Bankers Fuel Public Outrage
April 21, 2009
"Bank Lending Keeps Dropping," went the Monday headline in The Wall Street Journal. As Congress returns, bailout backlash will become road rage unless the President and Congress take action that is strong and credible.
Read on.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Connecting CIA Torture to Abu Ghraib
April 21, 2009
By blurring the lines between terrorism and combat – and by linking the 9/11 rationale to groups only tangentially connected to al-Qaeda – the Bush administration spread the policy of harsh interrogations far beyond terror suspects who worked directly for Osama bin Laden, newly released Justice Department memos reveal.
Read on.
GOP's Civil Liberties Hypocrisy
April 20, 2009
Just as Republicans have refashioned themselves as fiscal conservatives in the age of Obama, apparently forgetting that they allowed a budget surplus to be transformed into a record deficit while George W. Bush was President, they now seem to be taking up the cause of civil liberties – at least as far as right-wing groups are concerned.
Read on.
Friday, April 17, 2009
How Bush's Tortured Legal Logic Won
April 17, 2009
Almost as disturbing as reading the Bush administration’s approved menu of brutal interrogation techniques is recognizing how President George W. Bush successfully shopped for government attorneys willing to render American laws meaningless by turning words inside out.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Bush's Hypocrisy on War Crimes
April 16, 2009
In March 2003, after Iraqi troops captured several U.S. soldiers and let them be interviewed on Iraqi TV, senior Bush administration officials expressed outrage over this violation of the Geneva Convention.
Read on.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Exaggerating China's Military Threat
April 15, 2009
The Pentagon’s annual publication, “Military Power of the People’s Republic of China 2009,” accused China of stocking its military with weapons that can be used to intimidate or attack Taiwan and mitigate U.S. air and naval superiority near its territory.
Read on.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
NYT's American Blind Spot
April 15, 2009
On Tuesday, the New York Times ran two editorials that staked out sound positions – on the need for the American Bar Association to resist right-wing pressures in evaluating judicial nominees and on the value of holding tyrants accountable. But in both cases, the Times demonstrated blind spots about parallels to itself and the U.S. media.
Read on.
Anatomy of Bush's Torture 'Paradigm'
April 14, 2009
The prose of the recently leaked report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on torture seems colorless. It is at the same time obscene — almost pornographic.
Read on.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Reagan, Media and Heroes
April 13, 2009
When we write about a U.S. media culture that reflexively bends to the Right, some people dispute our analysis. After all, they’ve heard those endless complaints about the “liberal media.”
Read on.
US News Media Fails America, Again
April 13, 2009
Watching Glenn Beck of Fox News rant about “progressive fascism” – and muse about armed insurrection – or listening to mainstream pundits prattle on about Barack Obama as the “most polarizing President ever,” it is hard to escape the conclusion that today’s U.S. news media represents a danger to the Republic.
Read on.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Re-Fueling the Terrorism Scare
April 12, 2009
Virginia is for lovers, but there's a terrorist behind every dogwood.
Read on.
