Are We Worth It?

By Robert Parry
December 22, 2007

Like millions of Americans, we’ll be traveling some before Christmas, so we’ll probably not be posting as many stories as usual. But we are leaving up on the home page the stories from the past six or seven weeks for you to review while making an assessment of whether we’re worth it.

That’s because you – our readers – are the ones who will decide whether we can continue as a source of independent news. Either we make it with your financial support – through donations and book sales – or we don’t.

Read on.

A Society on Steroids

By Bill Moyers
December 21, 2007

There’s been talk all this week about that stunning report from former Senator George Mitchell revealing that Major League Baseball players, including some of the sport’s biggest stars, have been using steroids for years.

The findings prompted my fellow journalist and friend Dick Starkey to recall an important insight into America by the eminent social critic, Jacques Barzun. A Frenchman by birth, now 100 years old and living in Texas, Barzun, like his illustrious ancestor Alexis de Tocqueville, has been a canny interpreter of the American character.

Read on.

Huckabee & the 'Persecuted' Christians

By Robert Parry
December 21, 2007

Editor’s Note: To understand Mike Huckabee’s surprising rise to the top of the Republican presidential field, it’s worth looking back two years to December 2005 when the right-wing media manufactured an alarming tale about how secularists and non-Christians were waging a “War on Christmas.”

Huckabee – in his unthreatening, easy-going style – has managed to tap into that now widely perceived view among white Christian conservatives that they are somehow facing persecution at the hands of Jews, Muslims and atheists.

Read on.

Review of 'Charlie Wilson's War'

By Lisa Pease
December 20, 2007

What do you get when you mix a cocaine-snorting playboy Congressman, the sixth richest woman in Texas, and a blue-collar CIA officer with a huge chip on his shoulder? Why, the largest covert operation in history, and a hilarious, award-nominated film about it.

“Charlie Wilson’s War” has been billed as a political satire or comedy. While the film ripples throughout with truly hilarious moments, it is based on the true and very serious story of the largest covert operation in history.

Read on.

Robert Parry on Neocon Media Manipulation

Watch a segment from the recent Media Accountability Conference at Sonoma State University:

Media Is the Key to Democracy

By Robert Parry
December 20, 2007

When senior Democrats, such as House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, explain why impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney is off the table, they cite their fears of hostility from the American news media.

On Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now” on Dec. 20, Conyers said the U.S. news media has become such a problem that any Democratic attempt to hold the President and Vice President accountable might end up achieving the opposite result.

Read on.

Is Hillary or Barack More Vulnerable?

By Robert Parry
December 19, 2007

Even as Hillary Clinton’s operatives were dropping hints that Republicans would exploit Barack Obama’s youthful drug use, some Clinton insiders privately worried about her own vulnerability because the Bush administration possesses detailed knowledge of her movements – and her husband’s – over the past seven years.

Because of Sen. Clinton’s unique status as the first former First Lady to run for President – and because her husband was succeeded by a Republican – she is the first candidate to have both her and her spouse be subject to regular, long-term surveillance by an Executive Branch agency controlled by the opposing political party.

Read on.

Bush's Torture Policy Is a Cancer

By Brent Budowsky
December 18, 2007

In unprecedented congressional testimony, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann recently refused to say it would be illegal for American POWs to be tortured through waterboarding by our enemies.

He couldn’t because a policy claimed to be legal when committed by our government would be equally legal when committed by our enemies against our troops and POWs.

Read on.

Huckabee's Chairman Hid Payoff Secret

By Robert Parry
December 18, 2007

The pundits on CNN’s “Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” were unanimous: Republican campaign strategist Ed Rollins was a great guy and his hiring as national chairman for Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign gave it a solid jolt of credibility.

But Blitzer’s panel of journalists on Dec. 14 didn’t seem to either know or care that Rollins has withheld evidence since 1991 about the identity of a top Filipino politician who admitted delivering an illegal $10 million cash payment to Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign from Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Read on.

Surprise! Mukasey Covers Up Torture

By Robert Parry
December 15, 2007

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.

Read on.

Special Prosecutor Needed on Torture

By Brent Budowsky
December 15, 2007

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.

Read on.

Review of 'The Great Debaters'

By Lisa Pease
December 14, 2007

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.

Read on.

Mobile Labs to Target Iraqis for Death

By Robert Parry
December 13, 2007

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.

Read on.

Another Day of Infamy

By Mary MacElveen
December 12, 2007

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?

Read on.

Is America 'Better Than That'?

By Ray McGovern
December 12, 2007

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?

Read on.

America's Judicial Coup

By Robert, Sam and Nat Parry
December 12, 2007

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.

Read on.

Gary Webb's Enduring Legacy

By Robert Parry
December 11, 2007

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.

Read on.

America as a Prisoner of Primacy

By Carl Conetta
December 10, 2007

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.

Read on.

Why the Democrats Could Lose

By Robert Parry
December 9, 2007

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.

Read on.

Bush Spins Iran's Centrifuges

By Ray McGovern
December 8, 2007

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.

Read on.