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Last month, Democratic Sens. Charles Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California joined Republicans to ensure Michael Mukasey’s confirmation as Attorney General, even though he refused to acknowledge that the simulated drowning of waterboarding was torture.
Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada helped the Bush administration, too, by rushing a floor vote on Mukasey before rank-and-file Democrats could get organized and push for a filibuster.
The reason a special prosecutor is needed in the torture tapes obstruction of justice case, and the reason there is private panic in many Democratic and Republican circles, is that it now appears that some prominent Democrats, along with some prominent Republicans, gave a private thumbs-up to torture in 2002.
Waterboarding is torture. Torture is a crime.
Who would have guessed that the most uplifting film of the year would come from a Depression-era story about a professor who battled the ignorance and racism of his time to earn his all-black debating team a groundbreaking invitation to challenge Harvard’s champions?
Denzel Washington directs and stars in “The Great Debaters,” a film inspired by the true story of the Wiley College debating team from Marshall, Texas, that, under the guidance of professor, poet and labor activist Melvin B. Tolson, rose to national prominence.
U.S. forces in Iraq soon will be equipped with high-tech equipment that will let them process an Iraqi’s biometric data in minutes and help American soldiers decide whether they should execute the person or not, according to its inventor.
"A war fighter needs to know one of three things: Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?” Pentagon weapons designer Anh Duong told the Washington Post for a feature on how this 47-year-old former Vietnamese refugee and mother of four rose to become a top U.S. bomb-maker.
December 12th, 2000 was truly a day of infamy for those of us who do remember that on that date the Bush v. Gore decision was handed down by the United States Supreme Court, handing the presidency over to George W. Bush.
I still remember the phrase that was used in determining the outcome of that case, that “no irreparable harm” comes to George W. Bush. I have often thought of that phrase and have remarked: Well what about the rest of us?
A boyish, inquisitive face with an innocent look peered out from the Washington Post’s lead story on torture. It was well groomed, pink-shirted John Kiriakou, a CIA interrogator who could just as easily pass for the local youth minister.
The Post’s Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen, which describes Kiriakou’s experience in interrogating suspected terrorists, raises in an unusually direct way an abiding question: Should the United States of America be using forms of torture dating back to the Spanish Inquisition?
During the Iran-Contra investigation in the 1980s, special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh likened the Reagan-appointed federal judges in Washington to “the strategic reserve of an embattled army.”
When President Ronald Reagan’s political troops were under the gun of legal accountability, the judges could be counted on to jump into the trenches and find some legal excuse to pull the endangered operatives to safety.
Three years ago, I walked into my home in Arlington, Virginia, and checked my phone messages. One was from a Los Angeles Times reporter who was looking for a comment from me about Gary Webb’s suicide on the night of Dec. 9, 2004. It was the first I had heard of the news.
After I recovered from the shock, I called the reporter back to get more details. I also told him he would have a hard time writing a decent obituary on Webb because the L.A. Times had never acknowledged that Webb was substantially correct in his reporting about the Nicaraguan contras' role in smuggling cocaine into the United States in the 1980s.
As foreign policy disasters go, the American adventure in Iraq is a splendid one - "splendid" in the sense of being both grand and manifest.
We might call it "exceptional" as well, except that the troubles which beset U.S. policy do not end at Iraq's borders. The policy wreck is a more general one. The U.S. mission in Afghanistan has run aground, too.
National Democrats are upbeat about their chances in Election 2008, citing George W. Bush’s unpopularity and the weirdness of top Republican presidential candidates bogged down in squabbles over who has the right religious outlook or who is the most hostile to illegal immigrants.
But the smug Democratic hierarchy may be inviting defeat, again, by ignoring the fact that many Americans want leadership that appeals to them on the higher plane of principle. Instead, Democrats often treat Americans more like consumers than citizens, selling them new social programs rather than articulating an uplifting national cause.
Those who know about the centrifuges used to refine uranium tell me they must spin at an almost unrivaled velocity—almost unrivaled, because Bush administration statements are being spun at equivalent speed by White House and corporate media spiders.
Without weaver-in-chief Karl Rove and former presidential spokesman Tony Snow, it is amateur hour at the White House. And the theater would be as funny as The Daily Show were the subject not so serious.
Since the neoconservatives began to emerge as a political force in the mid-to-late 1970s, they have followed a consistent strategy of targeting the information flows inside the United States, paying particular attention to controlling the nation’s intelligence analysts and purging independent thinking from the U.S. news media.
Those were the two key switching points that allowed the neocons to push out favorable information and suppress contrary facts to shape how Americans perceived reality. Thus, the neocons could guide the public on issues such as the severity of the Soviet threat in the late Cold War or the WMD danger from Iraq and Iran this decade.
Election Year 2008 may represent a last-ditch opportunity to save the American Republic and its noble promise of “unalienable rights” for all mankind. Today’s political crisis cannot be overstated.
For the past seven years, George W. Bush has mounted an unprecedented assault on the nation’s Constitution. He has followed a neoconservative path toward an imperial system built on an all-powerful Executive, an ill-informed and frightened public, and a military dispatched globally on ill-defined missions in an endless war.
John Nirenberg began his walk for impeachment on Saturday from Faneuil Hall - a walk stretching from Boston, Massachusetts, to Washington, D.C.
John is taking this walk to give Americans an opportunity to sign his petition written to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to impeach the neocon criminals in our White House and to draw attention to this important action by The People.
Dear citizens of a crumbling nation, have you even noticed our country is being demolished all around us? Haven’t you noticed the pillars shaking, the foundation cracking, and debris falling everywhere?
I certainly hope so, because the Bush administration’s wrecking ball hasn’t quite finished swinging yet, so keep your equilibrium stable and your stand-post securely firm, because before it's over, there may not be much of anything left standing, or worth saving, and I don’t want to lose you.
Official Washington is remembering the late Rep. Henry Hyde fondly, recalling the Illinois Republican as a well-respected “pro-life” advocate who held President Bill Clinton accountable for lying about a sexual dalliance with Monica Lewinsky.
But there was another side to Hyde, who died Nov. 29 at the age of 83. As a senior member of national security oversight committees, Hyde helped cover up criminal and political wrongdoing by the Reagan-Bush administrations in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Normally when the Washington Post refers to stories on the Internet – even legitimate ones like thinking Al Gore prevailed in the news media’s recount of Florida ballots – the Post’s writing drips with sarcasm as it mocks supposed “conspiracy theorists.”
But a very different – even respectful – tone infused a front-page story on right-wing rumor-mongering about Barack Obama’s alleged adherence to the Muslim faith.
Read on.After almost seven years of malign neglect toward Israel-Palestine peace talks, George W. Bush is reinventing himself as a man committed to a fair settlement of this enduring and dangerous conflict.
Hosting a summit in Annapolis, Maryland, President Bush made a great show of getting some Arab delegates to witness the symbolic shaking of hands between two leaders with shaky public support back home, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
America can initiate the next New Frontier with a combination of the progressive capitalism championed by Lloyd Bentsen and the passion for justice championed by Robert Kennedy.
There should be a six-month freeze on home foreclosures while the Federal Reserve Board, Treasury secretary and congressional leaders bring together all stakeholders in the housing crisis to seek rational rescheduling of troubled loans with greater disclosure, transparency and fairness to all parties.
Read on.
