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George W. Bush, in his memoir Decision Points, says he was shown a copy of a purported memo about his shirking of his National Guard duty before a story citing the document appeared on CBS’ “60 Minutes-2,” and the former president gloats over the resulting controversy that cost the jobs of anchor Dan Rather and his star producer Mary Mapes.
After the initial hysterical security response to the 9/11 attacks — inane measures included posting 19-year-old National Guardsmen with automatic weapons at crowded airports and the temporary discontinuation of electronic tickets — lasting security augmentation entailed hardening of aircraft cockpit doors and beefing up passenger screening in airports.
A U.S. senator has an affair with the treasurer of his election campaign and political action committee. He then gives her a no-interest loan of $40,000, and pays $15,000 for her children's private school tuition. After their affair becomes public, he fires her, gives her husband a lucrative lobbying job to keep him quiet, and his parents give her $100,000 as a "gift."
Why should George W. Bush have been “angry” to learn in late 2007 of the unanimous judgment of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon four years earlier? Seems to me he might have said “Hot Dog!” rather than curse under his breath.
While people came to the American continent for many reasons, one prominent reason was to find a place to escape religious persecution. Sadly, those who were persecuted because of their faith often became the persecutors.
The U.S. government acknowledges that it is actively negotiating with Israel the price of a proposed 90-day cessation of settlement activity on the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem). It is reported that the Israelis are demanding two things be given them free of charge: 20 stealth fighters (worth $3 billion) and the release of the spy, Jonathan Pollard.
The most important intelligence documents used to argue that Iran had a covert nuclear weapons research and development program in 2003 turn out to have a fatal flaw: the technical drawings depict a reentry vehicle that had already been abandoned by the Iranian missile program in favor of an improved model.
George W. Bush’s memoir, Decision Points, is without doubt a self-serving defense of his presidency – and Bush’s own words condemn him as a liar – but there is another nagging question that surrounds this curious book: Has the U.S. media/political system become so polluted with falsehoods that even people at the top now believe the propaganda?
Funny how, back in 1929, we had a black Thursday and then a Black Friday as the market crashed, plunging the country into a depression. Now we have every retailer in every mall in America on their knees praying for a prosperous “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving.
At this complex and dangerous moment in history, we must recognize that journalists around the world are failing in their duty as watchdogs of the people and that – combined with economic stresses – the traditional role of journalism is diminishing.
Read on.Zionists of all stripes incessantly complain about anti-Semitism. They tell us that it is on the rise and that is why Israel is so important.
Read on.Although I grew up in a small town, I live in the West Village of Manhattan, New York City, just three blocks from Christopher Street and the Stonewall Inn, where in 1969 a police raid led to angry demonstrations that marked the start of the gay rights movement.
As President Barack Obama looks toward his promised December review of the Afghan War, he faces tough options – both military and political – including whether he will risk sinking his own presidency to sustain a war long bungled by George W. Bush.
Read on.As George W. Bush does a rash of media interviews to promote his new book, Decision Points, some people — even his post-Katrina nemesis, hip-hop star Kanye West — have begun to mute their criticisms of his presidency.
Read on.During the scandal known as “Plame-gate,” it became an article of faith in many Washington power centers that CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson wasn’t “covert” and thus there was no “underlying crime” when the Bush administration intentionally blew her cover.
We have all known people (some of whom we may be related to, or voted for) who act as if they're the sole expert on a topic.
The United Nations celebrated its 65th birthday (1945 to 2010) on Oct. 24, having lasted 27 years longer than its predecessor, the League of Nations, which was started in 1919 and didn’t formally shut down until 1946 although it had failed years earlier in its primary goal of preventing a second world war.
Sen. John Ensign, a Nevada Republican, has proposed amending the Espionage Act specifically to target WikiLeaks and other media organizations that “publish the name” of anyone “helping in our efforts against terrorism.”
The drone war that has been anticipated in Yemen for the last few months has been delayed by the failure of U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) to generate usable intelligence on al Qaeda there.
Read on.Once again, partisan Democrats are reeling in shock and humiliation, boggled by a familiar scenario -- the sheer velocity of their reversal of fortune and the Republican right's perennial ascendency.
Read on.Nearly three years after he was appointed to investigate the destruction of at least 92 interrogation videotapes, some showing two “war on terror” detainees being tortured by CIA interrogators, Special Prosecutor John Durham has decided he lacks sufficient evidence to bring charges.
Read on.Election 2010 was a victory for corporatist Republicans even more so than Tea Party radicals, a stunning resurgence for the Establishment GOP that says as much about weaknesses among Democrats and the Left as it does about strengths on the Right.
According to the Luke gospel, after Jesus was baptized by John the Baptizer, he withdrew for 40 days to think, ponder, and pray.
Read on.
In one of the most striking political comebacks in U.S. history, the Republican Party marched in lockstep to victory in the midterm elections and seized control of the House of Representatives and state houses across the nation.
It has only been a few days since the Nov. 2 elections and already the media in all its forms is awash with analyses expressing hallelujahs and curses.
The current cover of The Nation sports a tagline: “Losing Hearts and Minds – a Report from Afghanistan.”
In 2010, with the blessing of a five-to-four U.S. Supreme Court decision, unlimited money from anonymous corporate sources was allowed to call the nation’s political tune and decide the fate of American candidates for office.
Read on.The revelation by Wikileaks of a U.S. military order directing U.S. forces not to investigate cases of torture of detainees by Iraqis has been treated in news reports as yet another case of lack of concern by the U.S. military about detainee abuse.
Read on.The Election is over. The Dems were thumped. They lost the House, even if they still have the Senate by a hair. Barney Frank will be back but not Alan Grayson or Russ Feingold.
Already weakened by three decades of slow arsenic poisoning from Reaganism, the United States ordered up a new dose of Ronald Reagan’s special “government is the problem” elixir in Election 2010 – and it is hard to envision how this willing victim will soon, if ever, recover.
For proponents of American liberty, a volunteer military has always been preferable to conscription.
As satire has done through the ages, Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity” has found a comedic way to focus national attention on a serious issue: Will the United States begin acting like a responsible force in the world or will it continue to wander off into its own ghastly dreamscape?
Little Rock’s interim U.S. Attorney J. Timothy Griffin – already at the center of a firestorm over whether the White House has put politics ahead of prosecutorial integrity – made claims about his experience as an Army lawyer that have been put in doubt by military records.
Read on.Sometimes when perusing the Washington Post’s editorials, you have to wonder if the editors read their own newspaper’s reporting or perhaps they just look at what reinforces their preconceived opinions – as just occurred regarding Afghan War progress.
Read on.
An op-ed by Diane Mazur, a law professor at the University of Florida, addresses an infrequently discussed aspect of civil-military relations in the United States: the status of Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs, which are missing from a good many elite colleges and universities in the Northeast, and specifically in the Ivy League.
The judges at Nuremberg after World War II had a much deeper understanding of the horrors of war than the neocon editors at the Washington Post do. Assessing the barbarity unleashed by the Nazis, the Nuremberg Tribunal identified “war of aggression” as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
Because, at this time of the year, we take pleasure in being frightened, let's shuffle through the U.S. Empire's House of Horrors.
For decades, the Anti-Defamation League was a respected voice against anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry. However, over the past several decades, especially under the leadership of Abraham Foxman, the ADL has transformed itself into an advocacy group on behalf of Israeli government policies, even feeding anti-Islamic prejudices.
The documents on the U.S. War in Iraq published by WikiLeaks contained data on 15,000 Iraqis killed in incidents that were previously unreported in the Western media or by the Iraqi Health Ministry, and therefore not counted in compilations of reported Iraqi war deaths by Iraqbodycount.org.
Besides offering new details about the horrors that George W. Bush’s invasion unleashed on Iraq – where a severed head could be casually tossed into a busy intersection – the nearly 400,000 pages of secret U.S. military records released by WikiLeaks show that a variety of factors beyond Bush’s much-touted “surge” in 2007 contributed to the gradual drop in violence.
In late 1998, when the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying under oath about a sexual affair, many on the Right insisted that the issue wasn’t the sex but the perjury. They are now confronted with a parallel case in which U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas quite clearly perjured himself to get his seat on the bench.
Your recent e-mail, wondering "what the f--- is going on" these days, questioning whether we Americans have taken "more than your usual amount of stupid pills," is well deserving of a considered response.
During the 1980s and early ’90s, the CIA worked in partnership with BCCI in what was, at the time, the agency’s largest covert operation ever, pumping an estimated $10 billion into funding the Afghan mujahedeen. Through this operation, Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network was formed. Bin Laden had accounts in BCCI and ran CIA/BCCI-funded camps.
Read on.Michael Oren is the Israeli ambassador to the United States. This means he stands in a line of foreign diplomats who are often quite out of the ordinary.
One of the most memorable moments in television coverage of American politics came during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968.
It seems I upset a lot of people with my recent article looking at the four previous times in modern U.S. politics when many on the Left chose to punish the Democrats by casting ballots for third parties or not voting, a tactic under consideration again this year.
The talk in Washington of late has been Bob Woodward’s book Obama’s Wars. The books are piled in the front of every bookstore in town, and people are whispering in the usual “inside baseball” way, about who in the Washington security bureaucracies dissed whom to Woodward.
Read on.In all of our current economic issues, there is always a “back story, a deeper context” that is usually missing, “disappeared” like those Salvador Allende supporters in Chile in the l970’s who wanted to empower workers, not just rescue them when they get buried in a deep hole.
There were a lot of us in the run-up to Sept. 11 who had seen warning signs that something devastating might be in the planning stages. But we worked for ossified bureaucracies incapable of acting quickly and decisively.
The great divide between politicians and the people is showing itself in California where polls show the voters support Proposition 19 and where the mainstream politicians mostly oppose it.
President Harry S. Truman created the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947 to ensure that the policy community would have access to independent intelligence analysis that was free of the policy advocacy of the State Department and the Defense Department.
In July, the United States military issued its largest release of raw data on deaths during the Iraq war. The Pentagon tallied almost 77,000 Iraqis – both civilians and security forces – as having died in the carnage between January 2004 and August 2008.
Read on.If my e-mail inbox is any indication, many American progressives plan to use the Nov. 2 election as an opportunity to “teach the Democrats a lesson” by either not voting or casting ballots for third parties, even if this contributes to the expected Republican (and Tea Party) landslide.
In 2002, as the Bush administration was turning to torture and other brutal techniques for interrogating "war on terror" detainees, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz loosened rules against human experimentation, an apparent recognition of legal problems regarding the novel strategies for extracting and evaluating information from the prisoners.
Thumbing through Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars, I should not have been surprised that the index lacks any entry for “intelligence.”
