Entries from June 2007
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.
Categories: Uncategorized
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.
Categories: Uncategorized
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.
Categories: Uncategorized
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.
Categories: Uncategorized
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.
Categories: Uncategorized
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.
Categories: Uncategorized
By Robert Parry
June 23, 2007
Sen. Barack Obama’s decision to seek foreign policy advice from former Secretary of State Colin Powell has boosted the Democratic presidential hopeful in the eyes of Washington’s insider crowd, but the move suggests that Obama is positioning himself as a conciliator rather than a battler, which may unnerve the party’s “base.”
Powell remains a beloved figure among Washington pundits and journalists despite his controversial role in selling the Iraq invasion with a deceptive speech to the United Nations. Many insiders forgive Powell that transgression, in part, because they also clambered aboard the Iraq War bandwagon in 2003.
Read on.
Categories: Uncategorized
By Robert Parry
June 21, 2007
If you’re wondering why the Iraq War is likely to continue indefinitely despite mounting public outrage and a failed military strategy, part of the answer can be found in two words: Carl Levin.
Levin, a low-key Michigan Democrat who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, has wedded himself to a line of thinking that is both historically wrong and logically unsound. Yet, his faulty reasoning, if maintained, virtually guarantees that George W. Bush will keep winning every war-funding round with Congress through the end of his presidency.
Read on.
Categories: Uncategorized
By Robert Parry
June 20, 2007
In years to come, historians may look back on U.S. press coverage of George W. Bush’s presidency and wonder why there was not a single front-page story announcing one of the most monumental events of mankind’s modern era – the death of the American Republic and the elimination of the “unalienable rights” pledged to “posterity” by the Founders.
The historians will, of course, find stories about elements of this extraordinary event – Bush’s denial of habeas corpus rights to a fair trial, his secret prisons, his tolerance of torture, his violation of Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches, his “signing statements” overriding laws, the erosion of constitutional checks and balances.
Read on.
Categories: Uncategorized
By Ivan Eland
June 20, 2007
The Bush administration may live in a bubble of “unreality,” regarding its foreign policy in Iraq, but neo-conservatives inhabit a parallel universe on Iran.
Unbelievably, despite the fact that the U.S. quagmire in Iraq has greatly weakened the U.S. position vis-à-vis Iran, the neocons are pushing for military action against that theocratic regime.
Read on.
Categories: Uncategorized
