Friday, June 29, 2007

The New Bush-Blair Vanity Play

By Robert Parry
June 30, 2007

Upon learning that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair would become a new envoy intervening in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a former senior Israeli intelligence official confided to an old colleague a two-word comment in English: “It’s nuts.” One can only imagine what the Palestinians said in private.

Rarely in recent history have a man and an assignment matched up as poorly as this one: an officious and deceitful Brit who collaborated on a disastrous scheme to invade an Arab country and who is blamed for the deaths of possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, now intervenes in another Arab land to get the Palestinians to shape up.

Read on.

Lockerbie Ruling Revisited

By William Blum
Reposted June 29, 2007 (Original article posted Feb. 5, 2001)

The newspapers were filled with pictures of happy relatives of the victims of the 1988 bombing of PanAm 103.

A Libyan, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, was found guilty of the bombing by a Scottish court in the Hague, his co-defendant, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, being acquitted. At long last there was going to be some kind of closure for the families.

So what's wrong with this picture?

Read on.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Next Generation of 'Family Jewels'?

By Robert Parry
June 27, 2007

The CIA’s belated release of its infamous “Family Jewels” sheds light on U.S. intelligence abuses during the CIA’s first quarter century, but this openness may actually obscure a darker reality – that the subsequent three-plus decades have witnessed worse national-security crimes committed under the cloak of greater secrecy and deception.

Washington’s current conventional wisdom is that the “bad ol’ days” of the 1950s and 1960s couldn’t recur because a formal system of congressional oversight was put in place after press reports first disclosed CIA abuses in the mid-1970s.

Read on.

The Right Sharpens Knives for 'Sicko'

By Jay Diamond
June 27, 2007

Do a search on "Hannity 'Sicko'" or "Romney 'Sicko''' on any search engine and you will find an assortment of You Tube excerpts of Sean Hannity recycling talking points off the panicked presses of the Heritage Foundation, CEI, AEI, Manhattan Institute, etc., bearing dire warnings of the health care terror Michael Moore and other evil progressives are preparing to inflict on America.

But in all their truculent and fear-mongering invocations of the purported evils of "socialized medicine," there is curiously something that Romney, Hannity, and all the other American rightists consistently omit; and in that deliberate omission is an important lesson in the way America's hard right works their deceptions.

Read on.

Monday, June 25, 2007

Bush/Cheney or the Republic

By Stephen Crockett
June 25, 2007

The recent claim by Dick Cheney to have both executive privilege and not to be part of the executive branch of government seems to amount to a claim that Cheney is simply above the rule of law.

It appears that both Bush and Cheney think they rule by divine right like the absolute monarchs of medieval Europe or the dictators of the old Soviet Bloc. Both need to be impeached.

Read on.

The Iraq-gate Cover-up Continues

By Robert Parry
June 25, 2007

In another show trial for Saddam Hussein’s compatriots – followed by more death sentences – an unnoted success for George W. Bush was how the U.S. press corps has continued to avert its eyes from the role of Westerners, including Bush’s father, in aiding and abetting Hussein’s murderous regime.

Major U.S. newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, reported on the June 24 death sentences meted out to Ali Hassan al-Majeed and two other senior Hussein aides without a single mention of the American role in helping arm and protect the Iraqi regime in the 1980s.

Read on.