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Pakistani president Gen. Pervez Musharraf is now teetering on the edge of the abyss, just as I predicted in the spring of 2007. He was pushed there by U.S. policy, and worse yet, his country is armed with nukes.
To prevent the Pakistani Supreme Court from declaring him ineligible to serve another term as president, a role he won last month in dubious elections, the autocratic Musharraf has declared martial law and ousted the Supreme Court’s chief justice.
So, George W. Bush sees himself as the great defender of the U.S. Constitution.
In a Nov. 15 speech to the right-wing Federalist Society, the President embraced the Constitution’s checks and balances as a vital protection against tyranny. And he demanded that federal judges act as fair referees, not political or ideological partisans.
The man who flew the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima passed away last week at the age of 92.
Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr. did not die from war wounds or violently at the hands of other people, years before his time. He died in hospice care, in a bed, from heart problems and strokes.
During Campaign 2000, conservative groups were given wide leeway in smearing Democratic candidate Al Gore without being called to account, even when the Vice President was falsely portrayed as a traitor.
For instance, in the weeks before Election 2000, Aretino Industries, a pro-Republican group from Texas, ran an emotional ad modeled after Lyndon Johnson’s infamous 1964 commercial that showed a girl picking a daisy before the screen dissolved into a nuclear explosion.
The rain pelted down in icy-cold droplets, chilling both the protesters in soaked parkas and the well-dressed celebrants bent behind umbrellas to shield their furs and cashmere overcoats.
Drawn to this historic moment – a time of triumph for some and fury for others – the two opposing groups jostled and pushed their way through security checkpoints, joining the tens of thousands pressing against rows of riot police lining Pennsylvania Avenue.
After three decades as a Washington journalist, one lesson stands out almost above all others: false narratives get good people killed and, perhaps even worse, could sound the death knell for the great experiment known as the American Republic.
In trying to understand what’s gone wrong with the U.S. political system over those three decades, I have come to view the core problem as the use of mass media to inject Americans with a synthetic reality that misrepresents recent history, exaggerates external dangers and ridicules the few citizens who object.
Editor’s Note: Six years ago on another Veterans Day holiday, eight news organizations published the findings of their unofficial recount of Florida’s disputed ballots. The recount had discovered that Al Gore would have won the decisive Florida election if all legally cast votes were counted.
However, just two months after the 9/11 attacks, the news organizations chose to conceal the obvious “Gore Won” lead, apparently putting their sense of “patriotism” over journalistic professionalism.
Read on.Mr. Smith has left Washington and Mr. Orwell has arrived.
First, let’s be crystal clear about how the Democrats threw a vote they would have won on Michael Mukasey and torture -- and let’s be clear why this happened.
“Lions for Lambs,” directed by Robert Redford and starring Redford, Tom Cruise, and Meryl Streep, opens this weekend. It is one of the few “must see” films of the year.
Through crackling dialog, splendid performances, and emotional sequences, the film seeks to elevate the national discussion not only on the war in Iraq, but on the Americans at home who have chosen neither to participate nor to protest.
When cataloguing George W. Bush’s lies – even if you stick just to his fabrications about the Iraq War and the “war on terror” – there are so many to choose from, it’s hard to pick a favorite.
There’s the one about how before Sept. 11, 2001, Americans thought that “oceans protected us” – although perhaps not from Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads, which during the Cold War had school children hiding under desks and homeowners buying bomb shelters.
One year ago, the Democrats ended Republican control of Congress, stirring millions of Americans to hope that George W. Bush’s Iraq War and his assault on the U.S. Constitution finally would be stopped.
Twelve months later, many of those once-hopeful voters feel bitter disillusionment toward the national Democratic Party, which has surrendered in showdown after showdown with the weakened President, from continuing to write blank checks for the Iraq War to ceding more power to him for his surveillance operations.
On the morning of Jan. 13, 2004, Tehama County prosecutor Lynn Strom unexpectedly announced that the state of California was dropping charges against Cynthia Blake and David Davidson for possessing and growing cannabis with the intent to distribute.
While the two medical marijuana patients waited in the courtroom, Strom and the defense attorneys disappeared inside the judge’s chambers to discuss the motion to dismiss.
Read on.An unspoken political vulnerability of Sen. Hillary Clinton is that she is the first presidential candidate to have both her and her spouse subject to regular, long-term surveillance by an Executive Branch under the control of an opposing political party.
Since they left the White House in 2001, Bill and Hillary Clinton – as the former President and First Lady – have been under the protection of the Secret Service, a branch of the Treasury Department. Records are maintained showing where they go and, to an extent, whom they meet.
Values that are extremely important to us as former intelligence officers are at stake in your committee’s confirmation deliberations on Judge Michael Mukasey.
With hundreds of years of service in sensitive national security activities behind us, we are deeply concerned that your committee may move his nomination to the full Senate without insisting that Mukasey declare himself on whether he believes the practice of waterboarding is legal.
Editor’s Note: Four years ago – on Nov. 2, 2003 – a U.S. helicopter was shot down over Iraq, killing 16 U.S. troops, an early “Vietnam moment” in what was emerging as a powerful Iraqi insurgency.
The incident helped convince a newly organized group of former U.S. intelligence officers, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, that the war was unwinnable. Below is the prescient analysis written by VIPS co-founder Ray McGovern on Nov. 3, 2003:
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.
This view was pushed not only by right-wing acolytes of George W. Bush but by leading media outlets, such as the Washington Post editorial page, which championed an argument from Republican lawyer Victoria Toensing that the CIA-headquarters-based Plame wasn’t covered by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is at her mushroom-cloud hyperbolic best, and this time Iran is the target.
Her claim last week that “the policies of Iran constitute perhaps the single greatest challenge to American security interests in the Middle East and around the world” is simply too much of a stretch.
Determined to gain the upper hand in Iraq and Afghanistan, George W. Bush has turned large portions of the two countries into near free-fire zones where any resistance, even in populated areas, is met with aggressive tactics that often kill civilians.
Though more attention has been focused on trigger-happy Blackwater “security contractors,” Bush’s military strategy has employed its own indiscriminate firepower – from loose "rules of engagement" for U.S. troops, to helicopter gun ships firing on crowds, to jet air strikes, to missiles launched from Predator drones.
The Bush administration is attempting to soothe the Turkish government’s apoplectic reaction to the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s label of “genocide” on Turkey’s slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians, which occurred almost a century ago.
The administration fears that an enraged Turkish ally, already threatening to invade northern Iraq in order to suppress armed Turkish Kurd rebels seeking refuge there, will also cut off U.S. access to Turkish air bases and roads used to re-supply U.S. forces in Iraq.
The president speaks of World War III and potential war with Iran with fevered rhetoric, in a near hysterical atmosphere, at a moment of great danger in the world.
The Congress, which has surrendered much of its constitutional responsibility on war and peace while the president aggressively seizes it, treats discussion of World War III as business as usual in Washington.
