Happy Fifth Birthday, DHS!

By Ivan Eland
March 15, 2008

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) just turned five years old. It seems like it was born just yesterday.

The department’s growing pains have made it a slow learner and a downright ugly child.

Read on.

Suddenly, a Dangerous Turn

By Robert Parry
March 14, 2008

Two seemingly disconnected events have created a suddenly dangerous turn regarding the future of U.S. wars in the Middle East.

One was the abrupt resignation of the person who has been the biggest obstacle to a U.S. military strike against Iran, Admiral William Fallon, the chief of Central Command which oversees U.S. military operations in the volatile region.

Read on.

Spitzer & America's Perverse Ethics

By Rabbi Michael Lerner
March 12, 2008

The cross-the-political-spectrum attacks on Elliot Spitzer and the intensity of the demands that he resign his office show just how far the right-wing sexual moralizing has been able to trump any other kind of ethical reasoning in American society.

Going to a prostitute is legal in some states and some countries around the world, and is often the very arrangement that saves families from splitting up whose sexual energies have diminished but whose love is intact.

Read on.

Nadler Disses Voters on Impeachment

By Ray McGovern
March 11, 2008

You would not know it for the news blackout, but New Yorkers of Congressman Jerrold Nadler’s district held a Town Hall/Impeachment Forum on Sunday to encourage Nadler, chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, to begin impeachment proceedings against Vice President Dick Cheney.

Panelists included former congresswoman Liz Holtzman, former Reagan Justice Department attorney Bruce Fein, human rights attorney and Harpers commentator Scott Horton, and John Nirenberg, the activist who at the turn of the year walked from Boston to Washington, D.C., in a futile attempt to meet with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on impeachment.

Read on.

Clinton's Up-Is-Down World

By Robert Parry
March 10, 2008

Throughout history, it’s been common for politicians to shade the truth when caught in a tight spot. But sometimes politicians push the limits, crossing the line into an Orwellian world where up is down, where bullies are victims, where people objecting to the lies are shouted down.

If that world seems familiar to Americans, it should. It is the world in which we’ve lived for the past seven or eight years under George W. Bush, as his clever operatives routinely turn truth inside out. Now, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is applying many of these same head-spinning tactics to win the Democratic presidential race.

Read on.

Bush, Colombia & Narco-Politics

By Andres Calas
March 9, 2008 (Originally published Aug. 8, 2007)

George W. Bush’s strategy of countering Venezuela’s leftist president Hugo Chávez by strengthening ties to Colombia’s rightist government has been undercut by fresh evidence of high-level drug corruption and human rights violations implicating President Alvaro Uribe’s inner circle.

These new allegations about Colombia’s narco-politics have tarnished Uribe’s reputation just as Bush has been showcasing the Harvard- and Oxford-educated politician as a paragon of democratic values and an alternative to the firebrand Chávez, who has used Venezuela’s oil wealth to finance social programs for the poor across the region.

Read on.

Honoring Two Activist Parents

By Vincent L. Guarisco
March 6, 2008

Editor’s Note: One of the cruelest acts ever inflicted by the U.S. government on its own servicemen was a 1946 experiment that put 42,000 sailors in close proximity to the detonation of two atomic bombs to test the effects on humans.

The experiment, called Operation Crossroads, harmed the health of many sailors. It also was a turning point in the life of one, Anthony Guarisco, who dedicated his life -- working with his wife Mary -- to address the threat of nuclear weapons.

In this guest essay, their son, Vincent, pays tribute to his parents and what they gave to him and to the world:

Read on.

Guess What? Obama Is Winning Texas

By Lisa Pease
March 6, 2008

Tuesday night, as the polls closed, the media proclaimed Barack Obama the winner of Vermont and gave all the other state contests of the day -- Ohio, Rhode Island, and Texas -- to Hillary Clinton.

But there was one big problem. A Texas-sized problem.

Read on.

Losing Iraq and Afghanistan

By Ivan Eland
March 6, 2008

America is an amazing place—one of the wealthiest and freest nations on earth. Yet because Europe has so many more cultures and languages in one contained area, Americans, compared to their European brethren, seem like country bumpkins in their knowledge and understanding of what is happening in the world.

Unfortunately, this tin ear for global affairs sometimes afflicts U.S. leaders and media, too.

Read on.

Hillary Plays the 'Gender Card,' Again

By Robert Parry
March 6, 2008

The campaign press corps missed what may have been the most important comment in the Feb. 26 debate – when Hillary Clinton reminded women that their chance of electing the first female president was slipping away.

“You know, obviously, I am thrilled to be running to be the first woman president, which I think would be a sea change in our country and around the world, and would give enormous… [applause] … you know, enormous hope and, you know, a real challenge to the way things have been done and who gets to do them and what the rules are,” she said in the debate.

Read on.

Hillary Clinton's 'Celestial Choir'

By Robert Parry
February 28, 2008

When the history of Campaign 2008 is written, a memorable image will be Hillary Clinton’s poor imitation of Barack Obama as she strode across a stage in Rhode Island mocking the idea that change will come when the sky opens for a “celestial choir.”

Though Sen. Clinton’s performance left many political observers wondering if the long campaign had finally gotten to her, Sen. Obama brushed off the affront with a smile and a generous critique.

Read on.

Dismissing Ron Paul

By Ivan Eland
February 28, 2008

As the nation’s major media outlets crown John McCain (George W. Bush on steroids) as the Republican nominee for president, their nearly criminal neglect of Ron Paul’s candidacy in the 2008 presidential campaign is nearly complete.

“Big media” have never deemed Paul a “major candidate,” as their paltry coverage of him shows.

Read on.

Obama's Sub-Prime Conflict

By Dennis Bernstein
February 28, 2008

I remember my first piggy bank: a little pink piggy, made of plastic, with a little slot at the top. The slot was big enough, perhaps, to fit a half dollar, a great deal of money to me at the time.

“A penny earned is a penny saved,” my father told me, as we dropped the first few coins into the opening, and I heard them hit bottom and bounce. And I can’t tell you how excited I was when we broke it open, after a year or so, and I couldn’t fit another penny into the slot.

Read on.

Why the War on Obama

By Robert Parry
February 26, 2008

While some cynics still view Barack Obama’s appeal for “change” as empty rhetoric, it’s starting to dawn on Washington insiders that his ability to raise vast sums of money from nearly one million mostly small donors could shake the grip that special-interest money has long held over the U.S. government.

This spreading realization that Obama’s political movement might represent a more revolutionary change than previously understood is sparking a deepening resistance among defenders of the status quo – and prompting harsher attacks on Obama.

Read on.

Behind the Kosovo Crisis

Editors of Consortiumnews.com
February 24, 2008

The Kosovo crisis of 1998-99 was the first international conflict that Consortiumnews.com covered extensively, relying on dispatches from veteran war correspondent Don North in the field and on investigations of Washington’s strategy by reporters Mollie Dickenson and Robert Parry.

Given the resurgence of the crisis over Kosovo – following its unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia and angry reactions in Belgrade and Moscow – we are publishing this look-back on our coverage, which faulted all participants in the human tragedy: Serb nationalists, Kosovar separatists and the Clinton administration.

Read on.

Is John McCain a Liar?

By Robert Parry
February 23, 2008

In journalism, it’s a safe bet that if you write a story with the suggestion that a prominent male politician is bedding an attractive female lobbyist, whatever other point you hoped to make will be overlooked.

That appears to have been the case with the New York Times article on Feb. 21, which led with suspicions held by some McCain staffers that the Arizona senator had gotten too cozy with lobbyist Vicky Iseman. The Times story then veered off into a historical examination of McCain’s over-confidence about his own moral rectitude.

Read on.

When the Terrorists Were 'Our Guys'

By Robert Parry
February 22, 2008

In 1976, when George H.W. Bush was CIA director, the U.S. government tolerated right-wing terrorist cells inside the United States and mostly looked the other way when these killers topped even Palestinian terrorists in spilling blood, including a lethal car bombing in Washington, D.C., according to newly obtained internal government documents.

That car bombing on Sept. 21, 1976, on Washington’s Embassy Row, killed Chile’s former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and an American co-worker Ronni Moffitt, while wounding Moffitt’s husband.

Read on.

McCain's 'Never' Is a Long Time

By Robert Parry
February 21, 2008

John McCain must hope that Americans won’t read the entire New York Times story about his friendship with a female lobbyist, because if they do, they’ll realize that his statement – that he “has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists” – simply isn’t true.

Though the article focuses on the friendship between the 71-year-old Arizona senator and Vicky Iseman, an attractive 40-year-old lobbyist for telecommunications companies, it also recounts McCain’s complicated history as both a violator of congressional ethics and a champion for ethics reform.

Read on.

Hillary Clinton's Options

By Brent Budowsky
February 20, 2008

At this moment, Sen. Hillary Clinton has three options, two of which are acceptable, one of which would be disastrous for her and the Democratic Party.

In my view she should withdraw today, though she won’t. Her second option is to campaign through March 4 at least but suspend all negative attacks and whatever happens, do it with class and grace as a unifier.

Read on.

Charlie Wilson's Warlords

By Ivan Eland
February 20, 2008

Both the book and movie Charlie Wilson’s War glorify the “colorful,” liberal, Democratic congressman’s successful crusade to bludgeon the reluctant, neoconservative Reagan administration into dramatically escalating funding, arming, and training of radical Islamists fighting against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Although the zestful life and escapades of Wilson make for an entertaining and true-to-(Wilson’s)-life movie, both the book and movie give short shrift to the dire, long-term policy consequences of Wilson’s and Reagan’s proxy war.

Read on.