56 Articles

Friday, February 10, 2012
Israel, MEK and state sponsor of Terror groups
(4 comments) Those who are politically and financially well-connected are free to commit even the most egregious crimes; for that reason, the very idea of prosecuting Giuliani, Rendell, Ridge, Townsend, Dean and friends for their paid labor on behalf of a Terrorist group is unthinkable, a suggestion not fit for decent company, even though powerless Muslims have been viciously prosecuted for far less egregious connections to such groups.

Sunday, January 22, 2012
Two lessons from the Megaupload seizure
(3 comments) SOPA opponents were confused and even shocked when they learned that the very power they feared the most in that bill -- the power of the U.S. Government to seize and shut down websites based solely on accusations, with no trial -- is a power the U.S. Government already possesses and, obviously, is willing and able to exercise even against the world's largest sites.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Chris Dodd's paid SOPA crusading
(8 comments) In his SOPA advocacy, Dodd has resorted to holding up Chinese censorship as the desired model, mouthing the slogans of despots, and even outright lying. Like virtually all extremist, oppressive bills backed by large industry, SOPA and PIPA have full bipartisan support; among its co-sponsors are Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy and GOP Rep. Lamar Smith, with many Senators from both parties in support and Harry Reid pushing it

Sunday, January 8, 2012
The evil of indefinite detention and those wanting to de-prioritize it
(5 comments) This Wednesday will mark the ten-year anniversary of the opening of the Guantanamo prison camp. In The New York Times, one of the camp's former prisoners, Lakhdar Boumediene, has an incredibly powerful Op-Ed recounting the gross injustice of his due-process-free detention, which lasted seven years. It was clear from the start that the accusations against this Bosnian citizen... were false

Tuesday, January 3, 2012
End of the pro-democracy pretense
(1 comments) one of the prime aims of America's support for Arab dictators has been to ensure that the actual views and beliefs of those nations' populations remain suppressed, because those views are often so antithetical to the perceived national interests of the U.S. government. The last thing the U.S. government has wanted (or wants now) is actual democracy in the Arab world...

Sunday, January 1, 2012
Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies
(28 comments) The candidate supported by liberals and progressives and for whom most will vote -- Barack Obama -- advocates views on these issues (indeed, has taken action on these issues) that liberals and progressives have long claimed to find repellent, even evil.

Thursday, December 29, 2011
Vote Obama -- If You Want a Centrist Republican for US President
(2 comments) That the contest has devolved into an embarrassing clown show has many causes, beginning with the fact that GOP voters loathe Mitt Romney, their belief-free, anointed-by-Wall-Street frontrunner who clearly has the best chance of defeating the president.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Can the U.S. Government close social media accounts?
The Obama administration and The New York Times are teaming up to expose and combat the grave threat posed by a Twitter account, purportedly operated by the Somali group Shabab, and in doing so, are highlighting the simultaneous absurdity and perniciousness of the War on Terror.

Sunday, December 18, 2011
Three myths about the detention bill
(3 comments) This is the first time this power of indefinite detention is being expressly codified by statute (there's not a word about detention powers in the 2001 AUMF). Indeed, as the ACLU and HRW both pointed out, it's the first time such powers are being codified in a statute since the McCarthy era Internal Security Act of 1950.

Friday, December 16, 2011
Bradley Manning Deserves a Medal
(7 comments) The oppressive treatment of Manning is designed to create a climate of fear, to send a signal to those who in the future discover serious wrongdoing committed in secret by the US: if you're thinking about exposing what you've learned, look at what we did to Manning and think twice. The real crimes exposed by this episode are those committed by the prosecuting parties, not the accused.

Sunday, December 11, 2011
Hillary Clinton and Internet Freedom
(2 comments) What Hillary Clinton is condemning here is exactly that which not only the administration in which she serves, but also she herself, has done in one of the most important Internet freedom cases of the last decade: WikiLeaks. And beyond that case, both Clinton specifically and the Obama administration generally have waged a multi-front war on Internet freedom.

Monday, December 5, 2011
George Orwell on the Evil Iranian Menace
(1 comments) The U.S. and Israel has bombarded Iran with multiple acts of war over the last year, including explosions on Iranian soil, the murder of numerous Iranian nuclear scientists (in which even one of their wives was shot), and sophisticated cyberattacks. Iran has not invaded, occupied or air-attacked anyone.

Friday, December 2, 2011
Congress endorsing military detention, a new AUMF
(6 comments) The Congress, on a fully bipartisan basis, acting not only to re-affirm the war but to expand it even further: by formally declaring that the entire world (including the U.S.) is a battlefield and the war will essentially go on forever.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Ruth Marcus Reveals Another Journalistic Value
(1 comments) Brownback's staff monitors Twitter for references to their boss, saw Sullivan's tweet, and then creepily complained about it to school authorities. The school's principal demanded that Sullivan apologize to Brownback, but she steadfastly refused.

Sunday, November 27, 2011
WikiLeaks Wins Major Journalism Award in Australia
(1 comments) The Walkley Foundation awarded its highest distinction -- for "Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism" -- to WikiLeaks, whose leader, Julian Assange, is an Australian citizen. What makes this award so notable is that the United States -- for exactly the same reasons the Foundation cited in honoring WikiLeaks' journalism achievements -- has spent the last year trying to criminalize and destroy the group.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011
The Media and Iran: Familiar Mindlessness
(4 comments) In Washington media circles, being chosen by U.S. officials as the mindless stenographic vessel for the dissemination of anonymous official statements is an honor higher than the Pulitzer. As Seymour Hersh detailed yesterday in an interview on Democracy Now, exactly the same precincts that took the lead in disseminating false claims about Saddam are being used to do so with Iran.

Saturday, November 19, 2011
Here's What Attempted Co-Option of OWS Looks Like
(16 comments) SEIU's effort to convert and degrade the Occupy movement into what SEIU's national leadership is -- a loyal arm of the DNC and the Obama White House -- has become even more overt WH-aligned groups such as the Center for American Progress have made explicitly clear that they are going to try to convert OWS into a vote-producing arm for the Obama 2012 campaign

Saturday, November 12, 2011
U.S. Takes the Lead on Behalf of Cluster Bombs
(1 comments) Obama's Defense Secretary is actually running around the country trying to scare Americans into believing that if the U.S. cuts military spending, the nation will be attacked. So you better support cluster bombs and demand that your Social Security benefits and other domestic services -- rather than military spending -- be cut.

Saturday, October 22, 2011
A Remaining Realm Of American Excellence
Such a rare display of unified, chest-beating national celebration is now possible only when the government produces a corpse for us to dance over. The American citizenry rarely finds cause to exude nationalistic pride except when the government succeeds in ending someone's life.

Saturday, October 15, 2011
The LA Times notices the "double standard" on Iran
As the United States continues down the path of state-sponsored assassination far from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, all sorts of tricky moral questions are likely to arise. But this much is clear: The world is unlikely to accept that the United States has a right to behave as it wishes without accountability all around the globe and that other nations do not.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011
The "very scary" Iranian Terror plot
(9 comments) The ironies here are so self-evident it's hard to work up the energy to point them out. Outside of Pentagon reporters, Washington Post Editorial Page Editors, and Brookings "scholars," is there a person on the planet anywhere who can listen with a straight face as drone-addicted U.S. Government officials righteously condemn the evil, illegal act of entering another country to commit an assassination?

Thursday, October 6, 2011
Execution by secret WH committee
(8 comments) Even for those deeply cynical about American political culture: wouldn't you have thought a few years ago that having the President create a White House panel to place Americans on a CIA hit list -- in secret, without a shred of due process -- would be a bridge too far?

Friday, September 30, 2011
The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality
(13 comments) What's most amazing is that U.S. citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government's new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government.

Friday, September 2, 2011
Facts and myths in the WikiLeaks/Guardian saga
(2 comments) As usual, many of those running around righteously condemning WikiLeaks for the potential, prospective, unintentional harm to innocents caused by this leak will have nothing to say about these actual, deliberate acts of wanton slaughter by the U.S.

Monday, August 1, 2011
The myth of Obama's "blunders" and "weakness"
(51 comments) How anyone can claim in the face of all that evidence that the President was "forced" into making these cuts -- as opposed to having eagerly sought them -- is mystifying indeed.

Saturday, July 23, 2011
Barack Obama is gutting the core principles of the Democratic party
(22 comments) Obama is now on the verge of injecting what until recently was the politically toxic and unattainable dream of Wall Street and the American right -- attacks on the nation's social safety net -- into the heart and soul of the Democratic party's platform.

Wednesday, June 29, 2011
U.S., Israel escalate threats against flotilla, including U.S. citizens
(3 comments) The type of uncontroversial statement -- you shouldn't shoot our unarmed citizens -- is inconceivable when it comes to the U.S. and Israel. So devoted is the U.S. Government to defending the actions of Israel's that it will even preemptively justify violent attacks on its own citizens, threaten Americans protesting Israel's policies with prosecution for aiding Terrorism, and isolate itself from the world to defend them.

Sunday, June 12, 2011
In a pure coincidence, Gaddafi impeded U.S. oil interests before the war
Why would we, to use the President's phrase, "stand idly by" while numerous other regimes -- including our close allies in Bahrain and Yemen and the one in Syria -- engage in attacks on their own people at least as heinous as those threatened by Gaddafi, yet be so devoted to targeting the Libyan leader?

Thursday, April 28, 2011
FBI serves Grand Jury subpoena likely relating to WikiLeaks
(1 comments) The FBI yesterday served a Grand Jury subpoena in Boston on a Cambridge resident, compelling his appearance to testify in Alexandria, Virgina. The individual served has been publicly linked to the WikiLeaks case, and it is highly likely that the Subpoena was issued in connection with that investigation.

Saturday, April 23, 2011
President Obama speaks on Manning and the rule of law
(6 comments) The impropriety of Obama's public pre-trial declaration of Manning's guilt ("He broke the law") is both gross and manifest. How can Manning possibly expect to receive a fair hearing from military officers when their Commander-in-Chief has already decreed his guilt?

Sunday, February 27, 2011
The military/media attacks on the Hastings article
(1 comments) Last June, when Rolling Stone published Michael Hastings' article which ended the career of Obama's Afghanistan commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal -- an article which was just awarded the prestigious Polk Award -- the attacks on Hastings were led not by military officials but by some of Hastings' most celebrated journalistic colleagues.

Sunday, January 16, 2011
Homeland Security's laptop seizures: Interview with Rep. Sanchez
(2 comments) It's simply inconceivable that the U.S. Government gets away with seizing someone's laptop, digging through it, recording it all, storing the data somewhere, and then distributing it to various agencies is about the most invasive, privacy-destroying measure imaginable.

Monday, December 27, 2010
The worsening journalistic disgrace at Wired
(4 comments) It is just inconceivable that someone who claims to be a "journalist" -- or who wants to be regarded as one -- would actively conceal from the public, for months on end, the key evidence in a political story that has generated headlines around the world.

Saturday, December 25, 2010
What WikiLeaks revealed to the world in 2010
(8 comments) What WikiLeaks exposed to the world just in the last year: the breadth of the corruption, deceit, brutality and criminality on the part of the world's most powerful factions.

Thursday, December 2, 2010
Joe Lieberman emulates Chinese dictators
(2 comments) That Joe Lieberman is abusing his position as Homeland Security Chairman to thuggishly dictate to private companies which websites they should and should not host -- and, more important, what you can and cannot read on the Internet -- is one of the most pernicious acts by a U.S. Senator in quite some time.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Government yells "Terrorism" to justify TSA procedures
The all-justifying, cure-all solution for every problem: government officials run to the nearest media outlet they can find and anonymously scream "TERRORISM." No evidence is needed; the anonymity precludes all accountability; fear levels are quickly ratcheted up; and everything the Government wants to do then becomes justifiable in its name.

Sunday, July 4, 2010
Bill Keller's self-defense on "torture"
(1 comments) To justify his paper's conduct, Keller adds "that defenders of the practice of water-boarding, 'including senior officials of the Bush administration,' insisted that it did not constitute torture." Kudos to Keller for admitting who dictates what his newspaper says and does not say.

Sunday, June 27, 2010
How many Americans are targeted for assassination?
(2 comments) Senator Obama said the President lacks the power merely to detain U.S. citizens without charges; indeed, when asked if "the Constitution permit[s]" that, he responded: "no." Yet now, as President, he claims the power to assassinate them without charges.

Sunday, June 20, 2010
The strange and consequential case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks
(1 comments) What makes WikiLeaks particularly threatening to the most powerful factions is that they cannot control it. Even when whistle-blowers in the past have leaked serious corruption and criminal conduct to perfectly good journalists at the nation's largest corporate media outlets, government officials could control how the information was disclosed.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010
The absence of debate over war
(3 comments) One significant cause of America's indifference to the wars we are waging is that those wars have virtually no effect on the overwhelming majority of Americans (at least no recognized effect), while they impose a huge cost on a tiny sliver of the population: those who fight the wars and their families.

Saturday, May 15, 2010
New target of rights erosions: U.S. citizens
(1 comments) There is, of course, no moral difference between subjecting citizens and non-citizens to abusive or tyrannical treatment. But as a practical matter, the dangers intensify when the denial of rights is aimed at a government's own population.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010
"Reporting" on Iran should seem familiar
(2 comments) It would be irrational for Iran not to want a nuclear weapon capability. What else would a rational Iranian leader conclude as they look at the US military's invasion and occupation of two of its neighboring, non-nuclear countries? If our goal were to create a world where Iran was incentivized to obtain nuclear weapons, we couldn't do a better job than we're doing now.

Sunday, January 3, 2010
The degrading effects of terrorism fears
(1 comments) What inevitably happens to a citizenry that is fed a steady diet of fear and terror for years. It regresses into pure childhood. The result is a citizenry far more terrorized by our own institutions than foreign Terrorists could ever dream of achieving on their own.

Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Rove: Champion of "traditional" divorce
(3 comments) If Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and their friends and followers actually were required by law to stay married to their wives -- the way that "traditional marriage" was generally supposed to work -- the movement to have our secular laws conform to "traditional marriage" principles would almost certainly die a quick, quiet and well-deserved death.

Friday, November 20, 2009
The Washington establishment suffers a serious defeat
(3 comments) Populist anger over elite-favoring economic policies has long been brewing on both the Right and Left (and in between), but neither political party can capitalize on it because they're both dependent upon and subservient to the same elite interests which benefit from those policies.

Sunday, October 11, 2009
Has There Been a Virtual Coup D'Etat by Wall Street? Who Own Our Government?
(7 comments) The Administration refused to break the power of the big banks, when they had the opportunity, earlier this year. And the regulatory reforms they are now pursuing will turn out to be essentially meaningless.

Friday, October 9, 2009
A historian's account of Democrats and Bush-era war crimes
This war on transparency is all culminating with a White House-backed effort -- spearheaded by key ally Joe Lieberman -- to sweep aside two federal court rulings and to write a new exemption for FOIA that has no purpose but to prevent the world from seeing new and critical evidence of systematic American war crimes.

Friday, September 25, 2009
Victory on preventive detention law: in context
Obama is continuing the unconstitutional practice begun by the Bush Administration of imprisoning "suspects" without charges and without a public trial. He recently backed down from seeking a law that would pretend to legitimize this practice. "Preventive detention" is indefensible militariliy, morally, and legally.

Sunday, August 2, 2009
GE's silencing of Olbermann and MSNBC's sleazy use of Richard Wolffe
(4 comments) We have an example of GE's forcibly silencing the top-rated commentator on MSNBC -- ordering him not to hold Fox News accountable any longer -- because, in return, News Corp. has agreed to silence its own commentators from criticizing GE. The corporations that own our largest news organizations have extensive relationships with the federal government.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Stephen Colbert on Chuck Todd and torture investigations
It was the regime itself, implemented at the highest levels of our government, that was criminal. Prosecuting only low-level interrogators who followed the torturing spirit of those policies but transgressed some bureaucratic guidelines would be a travesty.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Glenn Greenwald: The Obama Justice System
(12 comments) ...what has clearly emerged as the core "principle" of Obama justice when it comes to accused Terrorists -- namely, "due process" is pure window dressing with only one goal: to ensure that anyone the President wants to keep imprisoned will remain in prison.

Sunday, June 21, 2009
Obama, the Right and defendants' rights
This was yet another case where the Obama DOJ sided with the Bush administration and advocated the position that the conservative justices adopted. The Obama DOJ aggressively argued before the Court that convicted criminals have no constitutional right to access evidence for DNA analysis.

Friday, April 24, 2009
Democratic complicity and what "politicizing justice" really means
(16 comments) Those who make that argument are clearly projecting. They view everything in partisan and political terms -- it's why virtually all media discussions are about what David Gregory calls "the politics of the torture debate" rather than the substantive issues surrounding these serious crimes -- and they are thus incapable of understanding that not everyone is burdened by the same sad affliction that plagues them.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009
The Pulitzer-winning investigation that dare not be uttered on TV
(4 comments) The NYT David Barstow won a Pulitzer Prize for two articles that were completely suppressed by virtually every network and cable news show--tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and TV analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended.

Saturday, August 30, 2008
Massive police raids on suspected protestors in Minneapolis
(10 comments) Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets.

Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Angry, uncivil liberal bloggers
(1 comments) any talk by right wingers about the left's hatred for the right is pretty clearly balanced out by this New Republic Cover calling Judith Plame, the C Word-- and that doesn't satnd for conservative. It's time, on this issue, for the right to STFU.