I’ve spent the last 24 hours traveling across the world (currently in Canada) and read this fascinating 17,000 word essay by Eric Alterman in The Nation. It discusses the importance of a progressive agenda, the difficulty of achieving this in the US with so many vested interests, the disappointment of Barack Obama, lobbying in the…
Showing all posts tagged United States
Journalists on the government drip-feed like to love their masters
The importance of independent journalism in a bought and sold world has never been more important. Being on the payroll of a government department – I was recently discussing with a prominent old-time reporter about the number of corporate journalists providing information to intelligence services – means that transparency is lacking. Example: US State Department…
Kurds and pro-war Americans clean up
Who says the Iraq war was a disaster? The American corporate world and some Kurds are making a killing.
Americans love the image of Israel
Decades of false propaganda have served the Zionist state well but these numbers will start to change soon enough: Support for Israel among Americans is at a near record high, a new poll showed. According to the Gallup Poll, 63 percent of Americans say their sympathies in the Middle East conflict are with Israel, while…
Has Washington just experienced an Iranian spy in its midst?
The curious case of Iranian scientist Shahram Amiri and his recent return to Tehran raises many fascinating questions, not least what happened to him over the last 18 months. Tehran Bureau wonders whether he may have been an Iranian double agent: The…possibility is that his defection was fake and that Amiri was in fact tasked…
Britain’s hands are blooded with torture
The British investigation into the previous Blair regime’s complicity in torture and terrorism is becoming clearer by the day. Such studies, while inevitably flawed due to a generally bi-partisan belief in keeping the worst details private, are a far cry from anything undertaken by America or Australia: The true extent of the Labour government’s involvement…
More journalists must take risks, says Wikileaks head
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in the Guardian: There has been an unconscionable failure to protect sources. It is those sources who take all the risks. I was at a journalism conference a few months ago, and there were posters up saying a thousand journalists had been killed since 1944. That’s outrageous. How many policemen have…
Chomsky on the justification for arming
Talk at UC Berkeley on U.S. foreign policy in Central America, May 14, 1984: We have a big argument here about whether Nicaragua and Cuba are sending arms to El Salvador. Well, I don’t know, so far there’s no evidence that they are, but that’s not really the interesting question. I mean, you gotta watch…
Haiti is the lost ongoing nightmare
Remember Haiti? Democracy Now! again visited the devastated country and found little has changed (though a long interview with actor Sean Penn discovers one Hollywood star who isn’t content to just make flying “humanitarian” visits): The teeming city of Port-au-Prince looks like a war zone. Rubble and debris is everywhere and has become a part…
Indict Bush and Cheney, says Fox contributor
If America was a nation that believed in applying law equally to all: This weekend Fox Business host (and frequent Fox News contributor) Judge Andrew Napolitano sat down with Ralph Nader to discuss, among other things, allegations that, under the Bush Administration detainees civil rights were violated. In the interview that aired on C-Span, Napolitano…